Laser hair removal – don’t believe the hype!

• Laser hair removal

Walk up and down the high street and you will be bombarded by images of beautiful young women offering you the chance to permanently get rid of the nuisance that is your hair (Laser hair removal). I have been treating  (Laser hair removal) women of all skin types with excessive facial and body hair for many years and the one thing that they all have in common is that they arrive at the clinic assuming that is permanent hair removal following Laser hair removal treatment is achievable. Of course this is a reasonable assumption when this is the message that is being publicised all across the country. Therefore permanent hair removal with a Laser hair removal must be a possibility. Right? Wrong!! There is no Laser hair removal yet invented which can provide permanent removal of anyone’s hair and no laser device has been licensed as such.

A much more accurate statement of what you can expect about Laser hair removal is long term reduction of hair. Often when a patient believes there has been no hair growth, there has in fact been re-growth of finer hair which is less obvious to the patient. You are therefore likely to need maintenance treatments after your initial course of treatment to keep things under control with Laser hair removal. These Laser hair removal maintenance treatments will be needed for years if you want an almost hairless appearance. Some patients are lucky and need very few maintenance Laser hair removal treatments while others need a structured programme of follow-ups to sustain their good results.

The other great confusion among patients, enthusiastically perpetuated by high street beauty clinics is that Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) produces better results than lasers. I would be wealthy and living in Barbados if I had £5 for every patient who assumes this. Unfortunately this is not borne out by medical evidence. IPL gives very good results in some patients especially those with very pale skin, with dark coarse hair. Overall IPL cannot deliver the results that standard hair removal lasers are able to.  IPL is not able to successfully treat all the different hair and skin types that exist. These variations in hair and skin types often require specific lasers to get the best results. Why, you might ask, would clinics and spas suggest that IPL is better? Well the average cost of an IPL machine is less than half the price of a good laser. IPL systems are also not regulated in the same manner as lasers are. So there are many benefits to a beauty spa in having IPL systems rather than lasers. This clearly distorts the information being provided to patients.

If you have been spending a fortune on laser or IPL treatments with only slow improvement and your best friend looks as though she never had hair on her face even though she started the treatment only on your recommendation – it may be that she takes after her Spanish grandmother and has black hair while your more fair-haired Celtic roots (pardon the pun) are not providing the target needed for the best results. You will achieve improvement but don’t expect the results to equate to that of your dark-haired friend.