Electrolysis is a long process and takes months to years to see any progress. It is also expensive.
My electrologist has been certified with 10 years of experience and it sounds like she has quite a few clients.
She won’t make any predictions about how many more sessions it will take for my upper lip, but it sounds like she thinks A LOT.
I’d just like to hear if there are any electrologists out there who make guarantees. I don’t want to spend all this time, money and energy, and find out a year from now that this has all been futile or that I’m expected to be going in every week for the next 10 years.
How can I ensure that I will get results in a reasonable timely manner? Can I take pictures and ask for a “money back guarantee”???
I’m sure that many people must feel the same way. It’s hard to have faith when you are putting thousands of dollars on the line.
I assume you are a genetic female? One problem with offering a guarantee is that no matter how skilled your electrologist is, you can have a condition that causes you to start growing new hair that was not there when you started treatment. Let’s say you had 1000 hairs to remove, and it takes 1 year for them to all come into phase and appear and be treated. The first 1000 you started with could be treated and gone, but new hair can grow out of hairs that were dormant when treatment started. Therefore it can appear the original hair came back but it is brand new hair that was never treated (and if you had not had treatment you would have had the original 1000 plus the new hair.) The electrologist could have done the job perfectly, but any potential new hair is obviously beyond their control and they can’t warranty that. And I don’t know of any practical way to tag all those original hairs and prove the originals were killed allowing them to warranty the original hairs were gone.
The problem with hair removal is that a lot of things don’t depend on the electrologist. They depend on the reason you have that hair in the first place and how committed YOU can be to consistent treatments on schedule. That’s why no guarantees can be provided. There are many many signs of how to tell whether you’re getting good treatments. You can see whether the insertions are good, whether hairs are coming out without resistance once they’re zapped, and whether the hair is getting finer etc after several months of treatments.
To understand electrolysis, you have to understand that hair grows in cycles. That means that it will take 9-12 months of consistent treatments AFTER your first clearance to remove all the hair you have (only a portion of what you have is visible above the skin’s surface at any point). So staying committed to treatments is on you. You have to go in as often as possible in the beginning to get to a clearance on the area. Then you have to go in as soon as you see new hair to clear it while it’s still weak, which is every week or two to start and will slow down to every 3 weeks or once a month by the end of those 12 months.
The other most important part depends on the reason you are growing hair on that area. Electrolysis can only kill hair that’s currently present. It can’t prevent your body from developing NEW hair. So if there is a condition, a hormonal one for example, that is causing it in the first place, you may need touchups later in life to kill those new hairs.
Treating the upper lip shouldn’t be super expensive. On average, women are done in 9-12 months and about $300 total.
The only time I ever gave a “Money Back Guarantee” was actually by way of a bet with a client.
She was one of those people who drive a guy like me crazy. She had what could have been an easy job (PCOS diagnosis aside) and she was not coming in on schedule, nor giving me enough time to complete full clearances when she did come in.
After haphazardly working on her face sporadically over 5 years, she made the comment that she liked me, and liked my work, even though electrolysis was not permanent, and would continue to come see me whenever she had a photo opportunity event coming up. I bristled, and told her that had she ever taken my advise and come in for the duration of the time that I prescribed, and, or the frequency that I required, she would have been done years ago, other than any small amount of new hairs stimulated by the PCOS, which would be only about 3 hairs per square inch at most.
I told her that if she would sit her fanny on my treatment table long enough for me to do a full clearance, and then come back in 2 to 3 weeks, and then stay on schedule of allowing me to totally clear her out at least once every 6 weeks, I would give her all her money back if we had not come to a point of nothing but the possible 3 hairs per square inch of new PCOS induced growth.
It only took 6 months to finish her at the rate that she then came to me, and years later, every time I bump into her, she tells me that she still has no noticeable hair in the treatment area.
I have no objection to a notary to sign any guarantee about the effectiveness of Electrolysis, provided that the customer is willing to sign that this area has not been shaved (at least 3 months before), nor is the hair between Electrolysis sessions.
An electrolysis provider could not give a guarantee without the contract spelling out both the responsibilities of the practitioner, AND the responsibilities of the client. If the client doesn’t come in on schedule, and the client doesn’t give the hair removal worker enough time to do full clearances, then the work is not being done in a way that a guarantee could be given, as the reason the person would not be finished would have nothing to do with the skill of the practitioner.
Any contract that I ever did regarding payment for a treatment area, where I was expected to accept one single payment for the area, included clauses that made the client responsible for actually showing up. Otherwise, the amount of treatment needed is extended, and I would end up doing more work, for less pay.
There really is more to this than simply standing behind one’s work.