Ok, my treatment might start in a few weeks but I want some advice if possible. I will reply back to this post to let everyone know how things are going when we start.
I want my practitioner to use electrolysis on my face (the area above beard line where hair should not grow for a man). I am 24 years old and have been tweezing that area for about 5 years. First the hairs were not dark but I can bet any money that the tweezing made them dark. It became a habit.
I will ask questions about treatment to my practitioner but I want more than one opinion. I tweeze the hair above my beard line (which are dark hairs now) once a week for half an hour. What should I do? If I stop tweezing hair for a month before we start treatment is that good enough? What consequences should I expect the tweezing to have on my electrolysis treament? I know I cannot tweeze hairs once we start but what about before, is a month good enough? The hairs are dark but not too thick so I can use those little scissors to cut them short and they become barely noticeable. Thanks for any tips, and hopefully I will keep this forum update with my progress.
You seem to have the idea. Stop tweezing now. Get in for the start of your work. Let her clear you out and be aggressive about your reclearance schedule. Once you get to First Clearance, you go back a week to 3 weeks later to have the area totally recleared again. Then you will be able to do it anywhere from once a week, to once every 4 to 6 weeks.
The plucking of the hairs has most likely made the hairs darker, thicker, and possibly distorted the follicles. This will make the initial work a little bit harder, and will cause the number of hairs available for treatment in the early going to be less than it would normally be, but in the end, it won’t keep you from getting to your desired result.
Ok, today was my seventh session for the back of my neck. I will use this post to keep everyone updated on both back of my neck and face. For the previous link to back of my neck please see :http://www.hairtell.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/57303/2.html
Today I was very happy. She only needed 30 minutes for the back of my neck. Even though I have been gonig for only 3 months twice a month I look finished. 
Here I would like to borrow some words from James W.Walker who said (I paraphrase) you will look finished as you are being finished. So even though I have had about 6 hours of electrolysis the hairs are thinner and you know the volume of hair is so low. It’s just fantastic.
I also got to talk to her about doing electrolysis on my face. During the consultation she said let’s try it a bit. She tried it on my face for about 5 minutes and there was some pain but bearable. My skin turned red for about 10 minutes after those 5 minutes, but nothing else. After 10 minutes everything went back to normal. I’m loving this!!! There was something interesting,…while she does electrolysis on my face she wants tme to hold on to this thing, it’s like a pen, but there is a wire to it, and it’s tied to the machine. She said that will help my skin look normal.
I would have loved to know more about what that thing was but she had tight schedule and I didn’t want to take too much time.
Ok here is an update. Yesterday I went for an hour. Half an hour for the back of my neck & half an hour for my cheeks.
Ok, first half an hour we worked on my upper cheeks (area below eyes & above beard line). I was impressed! It wasn’t too painful and she did an excellent job. That area is now free of hairs and no redness whatsoever. My cheeks look normal and cute lol.
Ok, the 2nd half an hour on back of my neck I was disappointed. Ok, so here is the thing. I took 3 weeks off between this appointment and the previous one to see my family in a different city. This is my 8th session. I did not shave that area or cut it short during those 3 weeks. But yesterday’s session hurt crazy. Ouch!! She told me that because the hairs were too long it was difficult for her to see an opening. Note that this is with the lady that did the last 4 sessions for me and the pain was bearable. She told me to shave it for next week and come back so we can do back of my neck.
I don’t know if the tweezing would change the hair color, but it sure can increase the diameter of the hair - and if the hair has pigment, then a larger hair will be more noticable.
In my opinion, if a client is tweezing once a week for 30 minutes, then they should begin with weekly treatments - that will be about 30 minutes long. Usually, in about 8 weeks, the client can then continue to treat that are weekly, but the length of the treatment will get shorter, or they can stretch out the time between treatments to 10 or 14 days. After another 8 weeks, they should expect shorter appointments or more time between appointments.
If the electrologist had trouble with the length of the hair, why didn’t she take some scissors and cut it?
Well Barbara, I was thinking of the same thing when I came home. She could have cut the hairs with some scissors but here is the thing. She was telling me she worked non-stop the entire day (that was around 1 p.m.). So she was tired and not thinking too well. Ok, here is the thing. I don’t want to complain because she has done a fantastic job so far, but I am unhappy that we are charged the same rate even when the practitioner doesn’t do as great of a job as a regular day.
I hear you, and I sympathize with you. Unfortunately, it is hard to make it plain that some jobs are actually harder than others, and so one will have fewer hairs removed in the same time.
It is possible that the problem was all her, but I would not say that is the only possibility.
Ok today I had a 50 minute session (20 min for face, 30 mins for back of neck). I was very satisfied with everything today. What I was most surprised by was the ease with which the hairs on my cheeks came off. I could hardly feel anything on my skin but yet hairs were being removed. My cheeks looked normal 20 minutes after the electrolysis session so no redness or anything. I am just so happy with the way the hairs on my face are being treated. What I also found surprising is that the hairs that I used to pluck came off as easily as the others.
They are probably those easy, moist early anagen (growing) hairs that we all wait for and dream about “killing”. They are easy pickin’s as treatments synchronize and progress. I had a chin and neck case today where the hairs just slide out oh so nice and easy. That’s when electrolysis is fun because you can almost be assured that those hairs are gone for good.
I think all sounds like it is going very, very right for you cool_guy. Wow!
Ok, today I had a one hour session. We did my face for 55 minutes and back of my neck for 5 minutes. I have to tell you wow I didn’t know I had that many hairs above my beard line. Finally, after 30 minutes plus 20 minutes plus another 55 minutes we have removed all the hairs above my “beard line” (I guess that’s what’s called full clearance). I am very pleased with my face because electrolysis doesn’t leave any traces, i.e. even after 10 minutes of the end of the session nobody would suspect there’s been something done on my cheeks, other than the hairs completely take out (no redness nothing!!!). Yeah we only did 5 minutes at back of my neck because she didn’t know my face would take that much time. So the back of neck will be left for next week.
I’m so grateful for having my cheeks free of hairs. I am more confident in public now because I have hair like normal man, not a werewolf.
Ok another one hour treatment. I would say we spent 35 minutes on my face and 25 on the back of my neck. Once again, no traces left behind on my face. There is no negative side effects to my face. It is just red for about an hour after the session is done. I am loving this thing more and more each day. The hairs on my face though did come back in large amounts. It seems that electrolysis has so far not been able to fight those hairs too well, and I know it’s my fault, it’s because I have been tweezing for 7 years!!! So, I will be patient. The back of my neck is going well. So far in 4 months I have had
sessions on back of my neck:
Session 1 & 2(1 hour each, each $66)
Session 3,4,5,6 (45 min each, each $54)
Sessions 7, 8 (about 30 mins each, each $45)
My face: 4 sessions in total. Each session was done a week after the other. Sessions 1, 2 and 4 were about 30 minutes ($45 each), and the 3rd session was 55 minutes.
The hairs on your face are doing their hair growth cycle thingy. They don’t come back, unless they were treated improperly the first time or…, they may not have been in the growth stage with the first treatment or…, they may be reduced in size from the first treatment. How do you know that those aren’t NEW hairs from follicles that are just coming to the surface for the first time. This is a game of elimination. You have more hair than you ever imagined, so don’t automatically think the hairs that were treated two months ago, are coming back.
Be very patient and stay on schedule. You will feel that this isn’t working in the first six months of care, epsecially. It does work, especially if you have a great electrologist. Stay with it, cool guy.
May I butt in and enquire (for clarifying for myself) why? What if the person were to leave the hair alone and let the hair grow out for a couple of weeks / a month?
Once you make up your mind to have electrolysis, just stop doing anything other than shaving, and let your practitioner remove the hairs. If you are no longer plucking, one will get back to a normal amount of hairs in 6 to 8 weeks.
from my experience, shaving the area at the back of my neck it seems that shaving is not good with electrolysis. Shaving makes the hairs more resistant and it becomes more painful when the hairs are pulled out during electrolysis. Not only that but also applying a razor to an area treated by electrolysis hurts (ouch…maybe it’s because the back of my neck still hasn’t healed from the first few sessions when the practitioner wasn’t that good). That’s just been my experience with shaving. So for my face I prefer not to shave my cute cheeks too high.
Dee, I will keep everything you said in mind.
dude seriously,
Not that I try to minimize your problem or anything but you said: “I want my practitioner to use electrolysis on my face (the area above beard line where hair should not grow for a man)”
Dude believe me, a beardline as in magazines or comics is a line that is almost non-existant. It actually IS extremely normal for guys to have hair above the beardline. Almost all the guys I know have hair above “the beardline”.
Actually I had the same stress as you when I was in my begin-twenties…I tweezed the hairs out as I was ashamed of it and always thought “I shouldn’t shave because then I will get a huge beard shade under my eyes”.
But after a while I couldn’t take the stress anymore and started shaving…And after a year I realised that I stressed myself all these years for nothing!
Now a couple of years later I understand why I see a beardline with all other people as in “they don’t have hair above it”.
because the same is with ME!
I shave very high on my cheeks but the hair is much less dense there so when I am well shaved you see the normal beardline…
My girlfriend even told me once “you don’t have to shave as far as my dad, he has hair even on the highest part of his cheeks” haha and I was like DAMN she doesn’t even notice!
So I said to her that I have to do the same but than the hair (when shaved) is way less noticable then the dense part under the shaving line.
I am so happy I took the balls of shaving it some years ago because all the fear was absolutely for nothing…
I always wondered how come mmy dad could always shave his face without having a high beardline, regarding the fact that I look like him in almost every way (even the hairy way).
Now I understand, he just shaved it and never thought about it.
But dude I hear ya man…I know how this can crank up your mind…REALLY I DO!
But in the end, it was all for nothing.
Now I don’t know how dense it is on your upper cheeks but I bet you if you shaved it (use an electric razor, that one wont get the small tiny hairs that one cant see, so the density won’t get more) you would notice after a while that you will just have the shaving line like most men…And just like most men you have to shave a part above the line…
Hope you find this useful man…Something like the straight perfect beardline is in my opinion non-existent.
Hi toeman, I really appreciate you taking all that time to write such details. Thank you.
It is kind of funny. A few weeks ago, which was 2 weeks after I began electrolysis on my face I asked some men in their 40s on some other site about having hair above the beard line. I asked if they shave it, and they were confused. The typically response was “well if you got hair there you got to shave it, and yes I do shave that high”.
So, it seems that it’s normal to have hairs too high on your cheeks, and you describe me very well, I have spent almost 5 years nervous about these hairs. I didn’t think it was normal to have hairs so high on your cheeks.
I will continue electrolysis with my face for only one reason, I don’t want to shave that area everyday. When I asked men in their 40s about shaving that high, I eventually got out of them that there will come a time you will have to shave it everyday to avoid feeling self-conscious.
I don’t think I want to go through that, and also I like how my skin appears when hairs are removed via electrolysis because the region doesn’t look “shaved”.
In the end, thank you. You are correct. I have come to terms with the fact that there is no perfect beardline. Thanks & have a great weekend.
Unfortunately, my first Ex has/had the only picture of me with a full beard. That photo showed hair that went up over the apples of my cheeks and onto my cheekbones. Some of my early hair removal sessions went darn near the corner of my eyes.
Unfortunately, I am certain that those pictures were used in some sort of black voodoo ceremony decades ago and the ashes spread to the four winds by now.
Good that you understand it…
About the “self conscious” thing…Haha! Then almost everybody should be self conscious when they didn’t shave for one day…
Because almost everybody (except for most asian people) have hair high on the cheeks and just shave it.
I was so stressed the years before that I even evaded close contact with people because they might see it.
My friend…It’s all in the head!
Now I sometimes don’t shave for 3 days and yes there are some hairs high on the cheek…So what!? Nobody has EVER mentioned them…And don’t forget…I am a man!
Ow and one other thing…If I shave it, I have the beautiful cheeks you’re talking about, so believe me, shaving won’t mess up the looks…
If you take a magnifying glass and look at it after I didn’t shave it for a day, sure you might see something…But, so what?
I won’t make you ugly, it is normal, most men have it…And now an important part: Girls wont give a sh*t! For all they care it is normal on every guy. They don’t even notice…
I am a good looking guy who likes the smooth face, I have black hair and I am mixed race so the hair is even more clear on my face…But you know? When I shave, I have a nice smooth face…Just as everyone else, with the “normal” beardline…
It is in your head…Finally shaving eased up my life SO MUCH! Because all the stress all these years was for nothing…
If you’d meet me, you wouldn’t even know I have hair there…And if you knew, you could see it isn’t bothersome or noticable at all!
Don’t forget, you’re a man! Don’t be ashamed of the fact that we are hairy creatures…And shaving above the beardline is EXTREMELY common…but because of the density one gets the normal shaving line, just like me…
But if you want to go on with electrolysis, then do it…No harm in that right?
But if it won’t work out in any way…Don’t panick, seriously…crab the balls then and shave…after a year you’ll find out the fuss was about nothing…
And you just threw away some nice young years on stressing about nothing.
Ok another update. On Thursday (Feb.12) I had a one-hour session. We spent about 47 minutes on my face and 13 on the back of my neck. Once again, I was pleased because my skin turned back to normal really fast. (By the way she uses blend!!)
There were once again many hairs on my cheeks. So far 5 sessions on my face in 5 weeks and a half. I will see her again in 2 weeks.
Message to Toeman: I wish I had talked to someone like you when I was 18 or 19. Those were the years I was so worried about having dark hairs too high on my cheeks. But yeah as they say, don’t cry over spilled milk. So, I will no longer stress over this. I also have hairs far too low on my neck. I was planning to do elecrolysis there too, but now that you mention it’s normal for face to have hairs that high, then probably it’s also normal to have hairs too low on neck. So I think I will not do electrolysis on the lower part of my neck, unless I see that it creates a hairline way too low. Thanks a lot man!!