I had my third underam treatment today, at 20 joules (last time they used 18.) It hurt a LOT more, during the treatment. Afterwards, I felt like I had been very badly sunburned. Worse, I just looked at my underarms, and in my left armpit I have red “streaks” running horizontally. They look like little red “spots” going in rows.
I never had this happen before, and I don’t know if this is completely normal, or if something is wrong. I am going to call the laser place, but I am a bit concerned.
I should add, I haven’t changed anything about my life since last treatment. No new medicines, no sun exposure, nothing.
Upping the joules a little bit, even two joules, can make a major difference in how it feels. By the way, the dead of winter is always a good time to up the joules because this is usually when most people’s skin is at its lightest.
As far as what you are describing, it sounds like a much more intense perifollicular reaction. What would be inportant to know is how does it feel and how does it look six hours or so after the treatment. By that time, it should be settling down. Normally it settles down much faster, but a normal reaction can last much longer.
If by the second day this reaction hasn’t gone away or if it gets worse, then you need to call the center and go in so that they can look at it.
Things seem to be a bit better. I mean, it’s still pretty marked up but not as bad as it was. It’s odd; you can see “stripes” where (I am guessing) the laser was zapped across my skin. It’s not like before, where there was just a generalized redness. It’s also sore, but some of the intense burning is gone.
I did got back to the center, and they were kind enough to take a look at it for me. The laser techs told me they had never seen something like this happen. They said they would call the nurse and she would get back to me, but I haven’t heard from anyone yet.
I am really surprised, since I did great on my last two treatments. Even the 18 joules didn’t cause much pain or redness. Maybe my skin is just sensitive, I don’t know. I suspect this will fade away and my skin will be fine, but it just scared me some. I don’t know what to expect next time. Should I ask them to turn it back down to 18, or is that too low to get good results? I’ve been really happy until now, and I want to be able to finish my treatments.
As long as you don’t have real dark skin, if you have irritation from laser within the first two weeks, there isn’t much to worry about IMO. If it is there after 2 weeks, you may have a problem. When I use IPL’s they occasionally “burn” my skin to some sort, sort of like you speak of. It all went away. When I was having laser, the more irritation I had the better.
Your LHR tech as never seen a reaction like that before, eh? That would unsettle me a bit I suppose… Do you have a pic?
I know that my underarm hair actually grows in rows – up close a few days after a shave, it appears as if the little hairs were planted by a careful gardener. The follicles are NOT randomly distributed over the skin. Is it likely that your streaks of red spots are simply rows of irritated hair follicles. The extra power would explain the added redness.
I do have a pic, but I don’t know how to upload it here. I no longer have my website, so I can’t put it up via that method.
It’s definitely not the hair follicles, as the blotches are more or less uniformly placed and well outside the area of heavy hair growth. Also, it’s in a square-shaped pattern, and you can clearly see how the laser was moved across my skin.
I heard back today from the technician, who had talked to the nurse. She said this can (rarely) happen, and should clear up. I’ve been told to use hydrocortisone cream, which is what I have been doing. It was really sore this morning, but it no longer hurts, and might be getting better.
I personally think I might just have really sensitive skin, and am unlucky in that I react badly to laser. However, they also told me the machine has been serviced right before I came, and a new handpiece was put on. I wonder if something went wrong there, since the treatment didn’t “feel right” from the start.
Anyway, they told me they’d turn the settings back down to 18 joules next time, which didn’t cause any problems for me before. I’ll definitely say something, too, if it seems to be hurting much more. I’ll try to find a way to put up a picture of what it looks like now.
Here we go. Here is a pic of what happened. All those horizontal red stripes came from the treatment (only the red box around the edges was drawn on.) You can see the little “hit” areas I mentioned. This armpit, my left, is worse than the right. Anybody know what this is?
Wow, that SURE isn’t hair follicles. Fortunately, the irritation doesn’t appear to be so severe as to cause long-term scaring. And your right side was not affected this way?
Also, remind us again about the laser equipment being used.
The right side WAS affected that way, just not as badly. I mean, you can see the little red “hits” where the laser (I think) zapped, but not as much.
I was treated with an Apogee Alexandrite laser, at 20 joules. As I said before, I’ve had zero problems up until now. 18 joules stung a bit, but my skin was back to normal in no time. This time, though, the treatment was extremely painful and continued to hurt for hours after (I woke up the next day very sore.) I can’t imagine what went wrong, as I haven’t had any sun exposure or changed medications. I do hope it clears up.
Could this be from longer hair getting lased/fried against the skin? I did have a similar reaction due to longer hair when lasered, but not quite so uniform in appearance.
Thanks for the photo to look at. This is not from longer hairs being lasered, though that can cause stripes along the skin. This looks to be something reacting with your skin that was dragged along the skin. The only possibility would be the spacer tip which could have either 1) dragged along the skin and irritated it (maybe a little jagged point) or 2) somehow the spacer is slighty misshaped, enough to impede the laser pulse and concentrate the beam in that area. It would not take more than just a touch misalignment in the beam to possibly do this. Either way, it is extremely unusual. This is something that is being investigated.
Regardless, please go in and have the staff look at it now that it has had a few days to settle down.
Thanks! I suspect it had something to do with the spacer, since they staff said that’s how the red streaks were spaced. As I mentioned, I was supposed to go in at 10:30am that day, but they called and rescheduled me to 1pm because “the laser needed repairs.” They told me someone had come in and replaced the spacer/handpiece. I think something went wrong in the repair, and it made the laser kind of wonky. My experience this time was so different, and the feeling so much worse (instead of the slight stinging, popping feeling I usually get, it felt like red-hot iron being dragged across my skin) that I don’t think it was just the higher joules.
I am still pretty upset. The burning redness has gone, but I now have dark purple areas of what looks like hyperpigmentation running in streaks across my underarms. Will this fade? Can I do anything to make sure it doesn’t scar or become permanent? I’ve been using hydrocortisone as recommended by the technicians, but I’m not sure it’s doing much. I’m going to try to get in to my dermatologist, but he usually has a long waiting list.
Looking at the photo and considering what may have happened it is very very unlikely that this will leave anything permanent. There really isn’t much more that one can or should do at this point. The hydroquinone pretty much inhibits the inflammation, but it takes some time for the body to heal. We’ll have a better idea as the healing progresses.
We still are not sure what happened. In fact, no one else had a reaction like yours or at all, so this is still a mystery. But we are researching. The person who came to repair the system was our in house manager who services all our Cynosure lasers. He is trained in biomedical repair and has additional training in lasers, especially the Cynosures. More details if we figure out what happened.
In the light of people who say things like “only a moron could cause a stripping, burn, or scar with LASER”, it is nice to find someone who admits that sometimes things happen and one just doesn’t know why. I have had friends quit the business all together because they have had a client get a negative result that they can’t understand, even though they did everything they know to do right.
There is more I would like to say, but this is probably not the post string to say it in.
I have yet to meet a person who hasn’t caused a reaction of one sort or another who is doing laser hair removal. People who say they haven’t had a reaction are either 1) stretching the truth or 2) not done a lot of treatments or 3) are so conservative that their clients are going to be very unhappy pretty soon.
I would think that this is also true on the electrolysis side of this house. I can’t imagine that you don’t occasionally have reactions, even when everything looks perfect.
We track our reactions. I expect to have minor reactions occur about 2-5% of the time. These are where the reaction lasts up to 24-48 hours. We also tend to have serious reactions (blisters, bad crusting, etc) occur about 10 to 20 incidents per 10,000 treatments. We don’t like to see any of these happen, yet the reality is that when they aren’t happening it means that we are being too conservative and not giving our clients the best treatments. So when I see our reaction rates drop, we spend time making sure that my staff are being aggressive enough.
The reality is that the most effective hair removal is just below the threshold of a reaction. And given how imprecise life is, one will occasionally overshoot. That is the reality. What is important is how well you handle it when it happens. We aren’t perfect, but we try to do our best.
The other issue is understanding what causes it. We try to always figure out the mechanism of action. Not always easy and sometimes it takes time to figure out. This example is a strange one. We’ve never seen something like this before. We’ve seen some similar things in the past but they were a little different. For example, we noticed that some clients were getting burned along the lines that we were drawing. It was baffleing until we figured out that the company that was making the ink we used had changed the formula and added some darker pigments to the formula in addition to red pigments. Just enough to absorb enough energy to burn a few clients along those lines. But it took us about a half dozen clients to figure that out. We had been using that system of marking for over five years without a problem.
I concur. The thing I have always said is that in the case of a bad setting or something like that, the electrologist usually sees what is wrong and changes things after one follicle is treated, whereas in the case of Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, one has typically treated the entire area with the problem intact before one notices there is something amiss.
Since what we are doing is purposely causing a growing part of the body enough damage to cease a bodily function we are by design causing damage. We just need to be able to keep the damage done within the limits of our understanding of what we know to be normal, and if we miss that, hope we are still in line with what we can help to heal on the back end of the deal.
Yes, I have seen some horrible electrolysis hacking as well, and I find myself asking how it is that the practitioners can see their work, take the money, and rebook the client and sleep at night.
Thanks for being a stand up guy, I am glad you are here.
