I had an electrolysis session on my chin, which I later discovered was entirely thermolysis, not blended or galvanic. The technician kept telling me she had to use more and more energy to get the hairs to come out without plucking them because they weren’t releasing with lower energy. I had warned her that I had a bad history with second degree burns from laser hair removal and I was very concerned that my skin seems to burn easily. She informed me that she thought it was safe, but by the end she seemed nervous about my skin reaction and started asking questions about how my skin reacts to shaving and how sensitive it usually is. She didn’t admit to a problem, but when I got home it had swollen up so much that the entire area was numb and the skin was turning glassy. Since then the healing has been rough. It was a full two weeks before the skin was fully healed, but afterward there was lasting PIE, paired with pitting and orange peel texture. The skin is also pretty fragile and seems to be new skin. I think the heat really damaged the surface. I later discovered, by questioning her, that she does not use insulated probes. I did not even know about insulated probes prior to this, but now that I do I consider that very concerning. I am also concerned that she cleared one area rather than feathering, since I now know the chin to be a dangerous area to clear in one pass. The hair removal was very effective, but I fear that is because I may have been deeply burned, and the pitting makes me fear that there was dermal destruction.
I’ve had electrolysis before, many times, but the first person wasn’t getting great results, and then she laser burned my upper lip and left what dermatologists tell me is a permanent scar. That was five months ago. I left her and tried another technician who had ten sessions with me that I think were pure galvanic, and it did nothing. Zero results. She was not very professional and I actually wonder if she wasn’t a scam. She didn’t even have an office, she worked out of her home. The third person I tried was the one who did my chin and damaged it. I had one follow up with her, which I made her do in a scattered pattern and with lower energy, and it resulted in pretty bad scabbing, which went beyond just plugs in the follicles and looks more like the sort of cuts you might get from shaving and cutting razor bumps, like large scabs. They seem to be healing, but they’re healing very slowly and are still visible after one and a half weeks. There is some pigment darkening where that healing happened, but that doesn’t look permanent to my eye. I am most worried about the chin pitting.
I will include an image of three days after the thermolysis session, and then if I can post a second time I will add an image of one month later, since it is limiting me to one image in this post. Note that the pitting corresponds exactly to the red open areas where it appears that the outer mouth of the follicle was burned off. You will note minimal hard scabbing and this is because I committed to a wet healing routine of constant treatment with burn care grade aloe, bacitracin, bepanthen, and ceramide cream at different stages of healing.
I am American, but I live in Finland where I’ve been widely informed that knowledge and expertise in electrolysis, especially for the face, is quite low and poorly regulated. I am a trans woman, and laser has been ineffective for me, so I have few alternatives but to keep trying electrolysis.
Note also that the image basically desaturated out the redness. The entire area is low to medium level pink in real life, consistent with PIE. The pitting is fairly well represented in the image, though of course in real life it has more definition. To find it, look for the red spots in the early damage image and then compare to the new image. It is mostly around the outer ring of the clearing zone.
I had a consultation with another electrologist today who said maybe this clears up in one to two more months. She did not sound confident about that.
