I’m a male, 40 years old, with downy hairs on my shoulders which I consider having removed. I typed my question in the laser section first (as I visited a dermatologist who suggested IPL), but it seems I’d be better off with electrolysis.
I have some questions of a practical nature: how much does electrolysis cost in comparison to laser (the dermatologist suggested 150 euro per session) and how long would it take to treat shoulder and neck with electrolysis?
And last but not least: how much chance is there that I will permanently lose the hairs and how much chance is there of inducing hair growth (as there seems to be with laser)?
Kind regards,
Dominique
The good news is that electrolysis has no chance of inducing more hair to grow. It can only remove hairs, and therefore is considered The Gold Standard of hair removal.
Unfortunately, answering your other questions are not so easy, as it is very practitioner specific. Hair removal customers are always thinking how much money per hour, when they need to look at it as how much money per hair. While my hourly rate is higher than some people (I know lots who charge more) but my charge per hair is lower than many, with the average being between ten and fifteen cents per hair.
Although the initial first clearance will seem to take a long time, the maintenance of that clearance will not take as long as the gaining of the first clearance. You spend a lot up front, so that you can spend less on the overall project.
You will need to audition as many electrolysis practitioners as you can locate, as the differences between equipment, technique, speed, comfort and condition of skin after treatment are wide and varied indeed.
I wish I could tell you more, but I don’t know who is good in your area. (Do you realize that you did not fill in your location in the profile information?)
Thanks for your answer, James. I live in Belgium, Europe.
So, there’s no way of giving me a general idea of what to expect as far as cost is concerned? It’s obvious that the amount of money I have to invest is quite important as well when choosing a solution. I don’t have thousands of euro’s to spend, alas.
It looks like finding the right electrologist is going to be the most difficult part of the whole thing.
Another question: is it likely that fuzzy hair on the shoulders is going to grow (coarser) in the next years, now that I am 40? I thought that is quite likely (seeing that people over 40 often develop hair on their backs), but my dermatologist said the opposite.
Kind regards,
Dominique
Although some people get more hair in places they never had it before (ears, on the bridge of the nose) as they age, unless a person is developing diabetes, it is not usually the case that a man would get more hair as he ages on the body. This does not mean that you won’t have drug interactions or hormonal consequences from other factors that could make that happen. In any case, one would be able to make short work of those later, if the base of hairs that bother you have been removed years ago when and if that happens.
This is the same area I have been wanting to get electrolysis on.
I have a question on the term “clearance” that I hear being used a lot in electrolysis. I know that electrolysis requires more than one treatment. So are the follow up treatments to get hair that has come in since previous treatment, and was not there before? Or do the same follicles need treated several times before they are completely destroyed?
There is truth, and there is what some people say to avoid confusing the clients.
The truth is that the majority of hairs treated will be gone and gone for good. The reality is that it takes time to get all of them in any one area, and then, you have to deal with the fact that the growth cycle is staggered such that the hair you have growing in January is different hair, growing from different follicles in June, and still others in October.
IF you get full clearances of all the hairs you want removed each and every time, then you will be able to simply work on the new hairs as they come in.
While the only hairs that one would ever retreat are those that were out of phase when previously treated (and therefore come in thinner and weaker next time) or were undertreated (having the same effect, they come in thinner and weaker the next year).
Now often electrolysis providers who either don’t know, or don’t want to explain the laborious truth will say that we need to retreat a hair 10 or more times before we can kill it, just so the person is not always asking “Are we there yet?” If you think it takes ten treatments per hair to work once, you don’t question why you have to keep coming back over the course of a year to five years, depending on the frequency of visits, and the skill and speed of the person doing the work.
Please read this:
http://www.hairtell.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/8979/all/Regrowth_charts.html