In May of 2019 I needed to do something about my body hair. I’m hairy… as in hairy Italian kind of hairy… and I finally HAD to have it as gone as possible. I’d read a lot about hair removal and over the years I’ve literally tried every crazy thing you’ve heard of and some you haven’t. Let me tell you NONE of it worked. Including at least a thousand dollars worth of home laser/IPL devices.
I decided I needed a professional so I started googling around for options. I knew electrolysis was probably going to give me the best result, but I couldn’t afford the expense (or the time) for that. The next best solution for me was laser. I contacted three places, one a national chain, one a local “jack of all trades” doctor and one a clinic specailizing in laser procedures.
I’ll write something about the specific provider I chose for the curious, but I’d like to keep this generic in the hopes that my experience can help the next person get a better result than I’ve had.
Now if you don’t know much about hair removal, have a look at the resources page (or Wikipedia), but the short answer is: “Rome wasn’t built in a day”… and hair doesn’t get killed off in one shot. Because hair grows in 3 stages and it can only be impacted in one of them, and you can’t know what stage any given hair is in… it’s a bit like wack-a-mole where you swat it and it comes back and you swat it again and again until it stops coming back. Additional complications being you can have multiple hairs in different stages growing out of the same opening in the skin and so forth!
Suffice it to say, hair removal professionals know this and will sell you a “series of treatments” intended to eventually get the hair in the right stage by simply repeating the treatment on a time schedule. The schedule is approximate and imprecise and the timing of every human’s hair growth cycles/stages are going to be different. Even to the point that the location on the body and hormone levels impact this. There’s a LOT of luck involved since every single hair can be on a slightly different schedule, and there’s nothing you can do about that aspect except hope the professional’s experience is enough to guide them to making the best schedule choice for you. You can help them out if you know your hair is fast/slow growing… but chances are you don’t because you never actually tracked the growth of specific hair follicles… no one does.
Anyway, the thing you do have control over is the intensity of the treatment. The laser is just a tool that delivers energy into the skin at the site of the hair growth. The idea being that enough energy will overload/kill the cell. Particular lasers are used with particular wavelengths of light to “target” the hair as opposed to the surrounding skin. If the laser delivers the energy to your skin… you end up in the ER with a burn, so you do NOT want that.
The problem is that the laser light is not smart or anything… the way this system “targets” the hair is by targeting cells by color and depth. The laser won’t penetrate inches for example (and doesn’t need to since the hair is within 3/8 of an inch of the skin surface). But the laser effectively targets a color… the pigment of the hair cells will absorb the light, generating heat (energy) and hopefully causes the hair follicle to die. The issue is light hairs are impacted less, and dark skin is impacted more… the ideal candidate for laser treatments is an albino skinned person with jet black hair. Chances are good that’s not you. (It wasn’t me either). But at least I’m relatively fair skinned and most of my hair is between light and dark brown. Anyway, the point here is this… if you have darker skin and/or lighter hair… the treatments will be less effective (or perhaps completely ineffective). Again… there’s nothing you can do about this… you have what you have. The only advice I can give here is: age will lighten your hairs (reduce the pigment amount/darkness), so tackle this before you get too gray.
So… back to the point… the level of laser application is all that’s really completely under your (and your providers’) control. But it’s important to know that there’s no way for them to assess how much energy is too much! Because of that, they’re going to err on the side of caution and start you off low. They have to walk a fine line between enough to get the job done and so much you end up in the ER!
Your job is to let them know if you can take more… This isn’t a day at the spa… it’s not going to be fun, relaxing or even pleasant… if the laser is doing it’s job, it’s going to hurt… the difference is it shouldn’t HURT!!! I can’t really explain it except that it’s like working out… if you’re not sore after the workout… you didn’t do it right, if you know what I mean.
I ended up with the laser at its highest setting and it was still barely noticeable. The problem for me was we didn’t dial it up to 10 until the 4th treatment (out of 6) which means 50% of my treatments were at sub-optimal levels… and therefore substantially less effective.
I wish I understood this from day one when I walked in or I would have told them not just that I didn’t feel anything, but that we should do a test where they treat a small area with several levels and see if there’s any damage/effect. Had we established that I could go to 10 without any burns BEFORE I started treatment I’m sure I would have had a much more successful outcome.
So, let me boil this down to two pieces of advice:
- Tackle this before your window of opportunity closes due to age/graying of the hair.
- Demand that the provider determine the maximum level of energy for each area of your body BEFORE you actually start the treatments you’re paying for so you get the maximum return on your investment.
I hope this helps… those are the two key things I wish I had known twenty years ago. I doubt it would have changed my timing… career and financial restrictions certainly circumscribed my opportunities (as they probably do for most of us), but the second thing would have made a huge impact for me… probably to the tune of many thousands of dollars.
Good luck!
