Laser and IPL hair removal require at least 6 sessions to be effective for the long term.  The reason for this is that only a portion of your hair follicles are actively growing hair at any time.  It’s the hair that absorbs laser light and transmits that energy to the hair follicle, thereby damaging it.  Those hair follicles that aren’t growing hair are essentially invisible to the laser.  Each time that a hair follicle with hair is hit by the laser, it will either be damaged or completely destroyed.  So with each treatment, more and more hair follicles are completely or nearly destroyed.

Another variable that affects the number of laser treatments you need is hair color, coarseness, and skin color.  Hair must be darker than the surrounding skin for treatment to be effective.  The ideal candidate is someone with light skin and dark hair.  If you have tanned skin and light hair, then you are a poor candidate for laser hair removal.  Patients with mostly gray, white, or blond hair are also poor candidates.  Coarse hair is better than fine hair since it presents a larger target for the laser.  Very fine or peach fuzz-like hair, such as occurs on the upper lip in women, can be challenging for laser hair removal.

Although 6-8 sessions are commonly enough for people to get satisfactory long term laser hair removal, your clinician will go over what you can expect during your free consultation at TMD Medispa.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 5th, 2009 at 1:28 pm and is filed under IPL, Laser hair removal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.