GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

It's better to have more treatments than getting burned.

I've seen a girl who got badly burnt by laser ("flash" thermolysis) and it produced a scar about 4" long by 1" wide across her upper lip.

A 50% kill rate is very good. In time, that may be as low as 30%, but a normal course of laser treatments is usually about 4-6 treatments plus 3-4 touch ups.

So with an average 30% kill rate, after 5 treatments you have:

(0.7)^5 = 0.168 = 16.8% of hairs left, concentrated on some areas.

Add 3 touch ups in those areas and you have about 6% of hairs left, with most of them white.

An average beard has about 10,000 to 20,000 hairs. That means you'd have about 600-1,200 hairs left after the laser course is done.

That's about 3 hours of blend electrolysis.

With me, the kill rate was about 60% after each session and 50% long term (can only calculate that post facto, of course) so I was left with about 0.4% of hairs. That is, about 50 white hairs that took forever to grow (and I got rid of half of them already with half an hour of electro).

Well, on the less-dense areas of hair, I got damn near 100% kill rate. (Or, at least, the hairs popped out very easily, as though the root had died... I guess we'll see if they come back.) In the denser areas, I guess some of the surface hair blocked the laser from reaching the roots, or perhaps the roots are deeper/hardier.

I'm in no great danger of scarring, though... we did a test site at the higher setting and it was fine... she just turned it down because we thought we could get away with it.

I was under the impression that laser hair removal was non permanent, and electrolysis was the only treatment that was. Did I hear incorrectly?

Laser was temporary hair reduction back in the 80s. In the 90s, it became permanent hair reduction and it's been improving since. Even though it's not total permanent hair removal (as electro can be), for some people is good enough to kill almost all hair for good.

As I noted before, three years after my last retouch and I've had basically no re-growth beyond a few white hairs.

"Flash" thermolysis is a type of electrolysis, not laser. And it is known for being more scarring than blend or pure thermolysis.

I just had my first laser treatment about 3 weeks ago. I won a $400.00 gift certificate at Pride Fest. My main problem is I had been epilating for the last year with no success. Now that I had my orchi done I've already noticed that my facial hair growth has slowed to half of what is was normally. But I was told only to shave and to stop tweezing the hairs, they need the hair for the laser to work. I go back on the 21 of Aug and I already have a nice batch that have regrown to be lased.

>Laser was temporary hair reduction back in the 80s. In the 90s, it became permanent hair reduction and it's been improving since. Even though it's not total permanent hair removal (as electro can be), for some people is good enough to kill almost all hair for good.

You're mistaken. At least in the USA. The FDA, who regulates such items, still does not permit laser to be advertised as permanent hair removal. Some people do this anyway, but laser IS NOT cleared as permanent by the FDA.

The company I'm using has a two year guarantee on their process. I hope it works as advertised.

I'm not in the USA and, frankly, I don't have much confidence in your FDA (which seems to be easily influenced by politics and special interests). They block some drugs and make generics hard to commercialize to benefit the big pharma interests that have your congresspeople in the pocket.

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/fda-scientists-pressured.html

At any rate, since 1998 some laser machines have been cleared by the FDA as producing "permanent hair reduction":

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/consumer/laserfacts.html



Which is exactly what I said, permanent hair reduction understood as killing only a percent of the hair. When that percent is 50% or more, the final results will leave you very pleased.

But there is no way to know what the percent of regrowth will be after two years. I know several people who are very happy with the end results (myself included), but also a few who are not.

Personally, my only regret is that lasers capable of treating my skin tone were not available before (they only hit the market in 2002). Electrolysis was time consuming, it did some slight damage to my skin and cost me a lot of money without showing much for it.

PS: B&C, read what you quote please. In my post I never said "permanent hair removal" but "permanent hair reduction." It's annoying when one is misquoted.

Laser only effects the hair that is actually growing at the time. Typically, only about 10% of the hair on say, your arm, is actually growing. The other 90% has stopped growing and just hasn't fallen out yet. And there are still al lot of hair follicles for which the hair has already fallen out and they have not started producing hair yet. So when you get your first treatment, you will notice it all go away, and then only a little start growing in. But the ones that have started growing in were not even affected by that first treatment, and neither were about 90% of the ones that disappeared. So you will need many treatments over the course of about 8-12 months to treat each hair follicle only once. So a 50% reduction at that point will make all of your hair 50% thinner and lighter in color. Your next round of treatments might achieve 50% further reduction. Do after 16-24 treatments, you might see a 75% reduction in the thickness and color of the hair.

At that point, electrolysis is probably the best bet to achieve final removal. As far as electrolysis goes, flash thermolysis is faster, less expensive, and (imo) less painful than blend, but it is much more likely to cause permanent scarring.

Since your hair is now growing more slowly you will need to space out your laser sessions a bit.