When you have excess hair, you may spend several hours a day plucking, shaving or waxing away the hair strands. This is a time-consuming process, but laser hair removal is faster because it destroys many hair strands at the roots, helping to reduce the new hair growth. Laser hair removal is often requested for facial hair that occurs in areas where shaving creates irritation that includes itchy rashes or red bumps.
With shaving, you can cut your skin, creating an ugly scar, or with waxing, you can experience terrible pain as the dry wax and fabric is pulled from your skin. Most patients feel only a pinprick sensation from the laser treatment, and it is also a fast process that doesn’t lead to irritation on the skin. With multiple laser hair treatments that are spaced several weeks apart, you can have fewer hair follicles so that your hair growth declines gradually.
Laser hair treatment uses a cool laser that emits steady pulses of light. Today, most of these lasers are controlled by a computer program rather than a medical expert. However, the medical expert will move the laser over certain areas of your skin to destroy the hair’s follicles. This treatment works best on the individuals who have dark hair that is on a lighter skin tone, and these are the individuals who have noticeable excess hair on their faces or their bodies. The laser’s light is attracted to the melanin in the hair strands along with the follicles of the hairs.
It is important to remember that a medical expert will only work on a certain area of the skin, so if you need to have a larger amount of skin worked on to eliminate hair, then you will need more than eight treatments. There are three hair growth phases that you should consider when you want to have laser hair removal, including:
- Anagen
- Telogen
- Catogen
Laser hair removal affects the hair follicles that are in the earliest anagen phase, so this is why you will need multiple treatments to reduce new hair growth on your facial or body skin. The hair reduction with laser treatment works best on black or brown hair rather than red, gray or white hair, and you will get a better result when you have coarser hair rather than having a fine hair texture.
With repeated laser hair removal treatments, you will notice less new hair growth each month, and within a year, you may not need to wax, shave, or pluck excess hair constantly to have smooth and bare skin. In addition to saving time, you will spend less money on hair removal products such as shavers, wax, tweezers or professional treatments at a spa. Feel free to visit Medical Aesthetics of New England in Acton or Fitchburg to learn more. We serve residents throughout the Boston area. Contact us today to schedule your consultation!
