I am considering starting electrolysis to mop up the remaining blonde hairs on my face after 7 sessions of LHR*. My intended provider can use local anesthetic injections (there’s a physician in the same offices) to do “pain free” electrolysis and will do mammoth 6 hour sessions for a maximum of three days in a row, so if needed I could get 18 hours done at once.
The issue is that I am having some facial surgery and my surgeon prohibits electrolysis from 6 weeks before to 3 months afterwards. I’d like to be done with hair removal before the surgery. There is still time to fit in one electrolysis session before the surgery and it could be 18 hours over three days if need be - but I shouldn’t think it would take 18 hours to clear the remaining hair (?).
The electrolysis session would be 4 weeks after my last laser session and 7 weeks before surgery. Just enough time.
Am I likely to be able to get done with one mammoth electrolysis session?
Or will each hair follicle need retreating multiple times?
*I had good results. Alexandrite laser, 15mm spot size, 23 J/cm^2, 5 millisec pulse length. (I’m a fitzpatrick type II.)
I am sure everyone would like to know where you are located, just to know they are close to such a service provider.
The question of can you get this done has everything to do with how much hair you have, and how many hairs per hour your provider can remove. If those things come in good, you should be able to do it with no problem.
Most prohibitions on electrolysis prior to surgery is cautionary just because of the possibility of infection. If you can get good work done and heal up in a week or two, you should be fine. (oh, yeah, my lawyer wants me to say that last statement was for entertainment purposes only)
Thanks for your reply. Sorry for not including my location - I’m in the UK. The intended electrolysis provider is the hair removal clinic at TransHealth in London (scroll past the IPL stuff).
Is it correct that once a hair in the anagen phase is treated with electrolysis the follicle is dead so there’s no need to re-do each follicle?
The phase is not decisive to ensure that a follicle is treated successfully.
Other factors are crucial for this to happen, for example:
The correct insertion.
The lesion in the target area of the follicle.
In my opinion, many of your hair can not be treated one month after the last session of IPL. The length of your hair cycle is altered and now the resting phase is very long.
If I were you, I would not do the booking of many hours before being sure of the amount of hair that can be treated. (I’ve seen penalties for cancellations).
When I get laser, even the thin blonde hairs tend to shed (although they are technically not “treated”, they still shed for some reason and leave me bare). I don’t know if that happens to other people, but if it does, then you may not even have enough hair left to treat 4 weeks after a laser session.
Also, even if you clear the area prior to surgery, you won’t be done. Most likely there will still be hairs popping up (because they grow in cycles so there is no way to kill all the leftover hairs at once, no matter how thorough you are).
I know someone who had a three-day marathon session to clear her whole face down in Texas. They had two people working on her at a time, and they worked very long days. She said she looked awful afterward, so swollen and red, but feels it was worth it.
I’m not so sure. That would definitely be the case if I was starting electro or laser from scratch, but I understood from my laser pracitioner that because I’ve been having laser, all the folicles will now be growing in unison and all my hairs are in the same phase of growth.
If what my laser practitioner says is true, then all the active follicles should be in the same growth phase and when they are electrolysised, there should be no/minimal future growth requiring additional treatments because there are no other active folicles left on my face. (All the hairs would have been in the same phase for electro, so all would have been treated.) (?)
You are misunderstanding a basic thing about hair growth. The hair you have growing in January is NOT the hair you have visible in June, is not the hair you are seeing in November.
If all your hair follicles got on one single schedule, you would have long flowing hair that would start growing in spring, reach its peak length in the Summer, and fall out during the Autumn and you would be bald all Winter.
No matter what we do to one phase of hair growth (including eliminate all hairs growing at a particular time) we still have to wait for the body to get to the time in which the next batch of follicles grows their hairs to make an effect on that set of follicles hair growth cycle. This is why the shortest possible time to completion for ANY hair removal job is what ever number of hours (or minutes as the case may be) spread out over 9 months.
Since it is so hard for people to understand this idea, many electrolysis practitioners who understand this, just tell the customer that each hair needs to be treated 3 to 6 times each, in order to compensate for the customer’s perception that "all the hair APPEARS to grow back 3 to 4 weeks after the treatment, and it takes months for the customer to see a noticeable difference in the number of hairs present, if the customer did not take a before picture to compare to a current picture of the same treatment area.
I just had a conversation over the phone this morning with a new client about this very thing. She was told by her previous practitioner that it takes several times or attempts to “kill” a single hair follicle. She was very upset that the electrologist she was seeing would treat hairs on her chin and then in five days those very same hairs had returned. This is impossible. It takes a whole lot of talking to teach the client about hair growth cycles while explaining patiently about what may have been happening. For instance, the hair perhaps was not being treated with enough energy for the right amount of time. In addition, we have to throw in possibilities such as hair breaking off below the surface as a possible reason for “hair returning five days later”. It is hard to be a consumer with all these “if’s”, “ands”, and “but’s” floating around and different practitioners explaining things in different ways.
If all our hair follicles were growing at the same time, we would look like our animal friends. So, thankfully, certain groups of hair come to the surface together in May and then in June there is a completely different group of hairs appearing and so on and so forth. This is about as close to synchronization as you’ll get for hair and thus we make the statement repeatedly here that [u]hair grows in cycles[/u].
I hear comments that is takes 6-8 attempts to treat just one hair over a period of a year frequently. It is not true if electrolysis is performed correctly. Electrolysis is a highly technical procedure that requires skill. It requires many principles coming together all at once in a customized way to treat individual clients with unique hair structures and skin types. Re-read what James has written above about ten times!
Fluffmonster, to apply the lessons above to your situation once more, let me say it in a generalized example: The hair that the laser was not able to kill last summer will reappear this summer and you can have your electrolysis on it. But in fall, you will see hair appear that the laser missed LAST FALL. You can’t kill it until it grows in, and it WILL NOT grow in all at once as soon as you stop laser. It will continue to grow in patterns during different times of the year, with only 25% or so of the unkilled hair (very rough estimate) showing at any given time. So you will probably want little electrolysis touch ups at least a handful of times over the course of the year if you want to kill every bit that the laser missed. But these touch ups will hopefully be pretty minor.
What everyone is trying to explain is that all hair that is VISIBLE is in active growth phase after you stop laser. BUT, you have another 40-60% of hair that is not visible and is dormant etc at that time.
Btw, we’d love your success story on the laser portion of the forum in the new Success Stories thread.