I have no idea where to post general hair questions, so since I am transgendered I'm posting it here;
When you see the follicle on a removed hair does it mean it's gone for good? If not, how can you tell if you get enough of the hair's root to permanently remove it?

Are you doing your own electrolysis and want to know if you killed the hair?

I think you mean "bulb" and/or "root sheath" when you say "follicle"? If you have a bulb at the end and a white/gooey sheath above it, you have zapped an anagen hair and it released as it should, which is a good thing. You won't know if it is really dead until the next growth cycle when it would normally come back.

Thanks for the response:) Yes, I am trying electrolysis and want to know if it worked. However, although I am getting hairs with the "bulb" and "sheath" when I zap the hair, I also got the same thing with some "test" hairs that I plucked without electrolysis. Any idea what might be going on here?

You might get a bulb on the end, but you shouldn't get a root sheath when tweezing. I can't find a picture of what the root sheath looks like, I think there is a picture of one on James' site. It looks like a white kinda-transparent sheath directly above the bulb.

Perhaps the electrolysis affected some of the near by hair or something? Can you send me the link if you can find that picture?

If a terminal hair is in anagen and it doesn't break when tweezed, both the bulb and sheath should be attached.

When doing electrolysis, the hair should release w/o resistance. If you feel it tug, it's either not in anagen, or the settings or insertion was off.

OK, thanks. There is actually a tug with all the hairs. Looks like it's back to square one:(

You are probably just not treating the hair long enough.

What kind of electrolysis machine/device and what modality are you using? We might be able to point you in the right direction.

You can post on the Do It Yourself forum.

I am actually using an experimental system. I don't even know if it can be called electrolysis, but it does use electricity. It's just a device that can be hooked to tweezers which sends an electric frequency into the hair. I don't know the correct frequency or how strong the current needs to be so at this point it's trial and error. I tested it on a small patch of hair on my arm fist. It's been three weeks and only some of the hair has grown back and the hair that has grown back is much thinner than before. I just don't know if it will work on thick facial hair yet though. *fingers crossed*