Laser Hair Removal: What You Need to Know

Foreign. Laser hair removal, which is a business we've been in for over 20 years. The first laser hair device that was FDA clear to permanently reduce hair was 19 in the 1990s. And lure started in the early 2000s. So we have early experience. There's a lot of people doing laser hair now, and I'm seeing kind of perceived lower quality treatment failures. And let's talk about what's going on, why it's working great for some people, not for others. Is it the laser? Is it the technology? Is laser not strong enough? Is it the patient? Is the. Is the clinic? Well, here's how it goes. There's a certain few facts that certain people really won't respond well. Laser hair removal, that would be gray hair that's not gonna respond well. Hair that's lighter than your skin type because the laser's target is a chromophore or something that's dark. So those are kind of not that common when we identify this beforehand. But what else leads to failure? Well, there's a few conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome and even menopause that can lead to new hair growth. Again, we can identify those. The most common reason for laser hair removal to fail is not enough energy was put into the target tissue, into the skin. So just a brief overview. How lasers work for hair removal is a laser is a single wavelength of light that has a chromophore or a target, a color of a target. In this case, it is particularly pigment. Now, there's a little bit of targeting to red blood vessels, to water, but the main target is, is the pigment. And the laser types that we use, there's different wavelengths, but they're generally aimed at that particular pigment of the melanin and the hair follicle. So if it's get again, gray hair is no melanin. A blonde hair is very little, so it's a little harder to treat. Still treatable. Gray hair can't be treated as absence of melanin. Then you have dark skin that has a lot of pigment in as well. So it's competing with the hair follicle. So then we have to figure out the dosage of the particular wavelength for the given area over a given period of time for it to work. Now, the original hair removal was a single shot in a spot, let's say about, you know, 10 millimeters by 10 millimeters and a little bit of overlap. We'd shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot. And then it just be one time, one pass. It took a lot of time and fairly uncomfortable. Because you're having to put so much energy into that single spot to kill a hair follicle. But it worked and it led to permanent reduction of hair. Now the hair reduction has got to be done, usually five or six sessions, because your hair grows in crops. So at any given time on your body, about 80% of your hair follicles are not active. The ones that are active are targets for the laser. And if you do this over a year or so, you'll be able to get most of them and have typically an 80% permanent reduction in hair. So that shaving and clipping and waxing becomes very uncommon. You don't have to do it very much anymore. It'll never be totally gone, but it'll be significantly gone. So we should expect 80% or more reduction hair after four sessions. So why do we see some people doing this indefinitely not getting result? It's lack of enough energy. So if you do the point and shoot method, there's a common undertreatment by leaving gap areas. So if the person, the technician is sliding it along, the ball's a little smaller than they think. They might underlap and under treat. And this led to an idea of what's called high repetition rate, low fluence laser hair removal, which is pretty much standard in the industry today. So the first technology that was for permanent hair reduction was to put a certain number of joules or energy into a given space. With the. There's some other parameters too, how fast we deliver the energy, but it's basically putting a certain amount of energy in a certain amount of space. Let's say the amount of energy was 40 joules per centimeter squared, and the spot size is 10 centimeter, you know, 10 by 10 millimeters. So 1 centimeter squared and we shoot 40 jewels into there and then move on to the next spot, Move on the next spot. That hurt. And it worked, but it hurt. And it was a little risk of burning because there's so much energy. We found if we put 60 to 100 joules per centimeter squared, 60 to 100 and did it over multiple passes, we could reduce the pain, reduce the risk because you're putting less heat in over time, less burns and get the same result potentially better because there's less likelihood to underlap and under treat. So that led to these low fluence, high repetition rate devices that they would shoot much faster at a much lower energy than the machines could keep up with. So instead of going bloomp, bloom, bloom, we're moving back and forth. Well, this has led to, you know, kind of what they call painless hair removal. They are painless, but it's less pain, does get hot over time, much more tolerable and much less risk of getting a burn. You can treat all skin types with it. But then, then what the industry never really figured out was how to train the technician to put 60 to 100 joules per centimeter square. Because they have a machine that's firing at a certain amount of joules, typically 10, 10 joules per kilogram per centimeter, and they're go wiping back and forth over it. And we found is that most technicians are way under treating the area. So they'll pick an area, let's say, this big. In an area this big, you've got to put about 25,000 joules into the area. Well, if you're rolling back and forth, you would put 5,000 joules in and think, well, you know, I'm done, I'm finished, and stop. So we've come up with a patented pending process where we've identified a certain type of template. We can outline the area, prescribe the exact number of jewels we want in that area based on the skin type and the hair type, and the technician can map it out and get a precise result every single time. Every single time. And this we've not really seen before. So the reason that laser hair sometimes gotten a bad rap and somebody goes to a place where the technician doesn't have any means for gauging how much energy she's putting in. For example, I see like a Groupon and others where they have a full body laser hair removal for whatever. Full body laser hair removal, if you're going to put 60 to 100 joules per centimeter squared with let's say a diode laser, it's going to take about six hours. You know, so it's really not practical to do the whole body in one sitting. And if they're getting done an hour, that means you're getting one sixth the amount of joules per centimeter squared. Now, the hairs may fall out, but you basically just cause depilation or just basically it's like plucking the hairs to actually burn the hair follicle. You'd have needed six times more energy to get the job done. This size should take about five minutes. So imagine doing that over your whole body. So that's, that's just a reality of laser hair removal is it definitely works. It works fantastic. These newer and I say newer, newer in the last 10, 15 years, high repetition rate Low fluence lasers are superior because it is safer and more comfortable. But what was lacking was the ability for the technician to count something that's firing 10 times per second as fast as that, and know where she's at in the area. So we've created a certain template system where we can map out the body. We set the machine. We know we want to put 30,000, 40,000 joules in that area, and we move it across, wise up and down, back and forth, so we have random passes, and over time we get the 60 to 100 joules per centimeter squared. Now, how do we figure if it's 60 to 100 jewels? It has to do with the skin type and the hair type. So there's. It's like lighter hair on lighter skin needs more jewel, more like 100 and darker hair. And darker skin needs less jewels, like 60 joules and that. That's the range. This can be done on all skin types, not all hair types. So gray hair won't work on peach fuzz. Very difficult. It may work, but it's very difficult. But normally dark hair, the stuff that you're shading, is very suitable. And the lighter your skin is and darker the hair, the more, you know, effective it is. So you'll have a better result. Maybe in three sessions, you got where somebody else took five or six sessions to get to. I guess some of those hairs that are starting to grow will be burned as well. But typically we have to do five or six sessions. That's why we sell them as a package. You should expect that you're, you know, for years or decades, you're not having to shave that area nearly as often. There still might be occasional shaving because again, there's some crops of hair that never got hit. You can always go in and zap them again because hairs do grow in random crops, but typically about six sessions over, say, six to 12 months, you've gotten most of the hairs 80% or more when you see upwards of 90, 95% of the hair is gone. So laser hair removal works in the right setting. When I talked about machines, there's many machines that work. They use different wavelengths, just a brief history of it. The lasers range from wavelength that targets more the blonder hair to targeting more of the darker hair and darker skin types. And there's one right in the middle that can go both ways. That's what most people are using now is what's called a diode laser. That's 810 nanometers and that can be fine tuned to Treat darker skin and lighter skin. The 1064 laser is maybe more suitable for dark skin, dark hair with a single pulse and shoot. But the high repetition rate, low fluence has been studied pretty much in the diode lasers for the most part. There are some 1064 lasers, which is arguably better for a darker skin type that does do a high repetition rate, low fluence. We do that, what's called frac3 on a photano laser. We have a few of those. We're usually using the dio because it really is a good all around workhorse. The Ruby and alexandite lasers for hair removal, we find they're not, not sufficient for most people. It's really for select. Maybe red hair and light skin might be suitable for. So just in a nutshell, the reason sometimes laser hair doesn't work is, was the process, not the laser generally not the person. That's all we're growing here. It was a process. We weren't getting enough energy into the area. And when you're seeing, you know, something at very low price, you gotta ask yourself, are we just basically plucking the hairs out with laser? Are we really removing the hairs permanently? It does take some time. So it's, that's the downside is that you have to lay there for a while. It does get a little uncomfortable. So typically we can use cooling or ice packs to manage it. People can tolerate without jumping or needing pain medicine. But it's a little uncomfortable and does take a little bit of time. If you do your whole body probably should do it in stages just because the amount of, you know, hours you have to lay there. Typically if a woman was doing say her hip bones to her ankles, you could do that in a day. It take about three hours, maybe, maybe a little bit more. But the full body might not be practical. If you're just doing full body and cling like say that armpits in the chin, bikini line, maybe around the nipples, the groin. That would be something that you could do in, you know, an hour or two, maybe less than that. But to do full legs is, is taking some time. So the summary of this story is laser hair removal. It's here to stay. It work great. It's being under. People are being under treated because they don't have a process for getting enough energy in. And both the technician, the patients want this thing to be over with. So you kind of can, may, may maybe rush it a little bit. So if you don't have, if you're talking to somebody with laser hair, you ask them, how do you know you're getting enough energy in there? And they're probably using a diode laser. And we want to get a total fluence, or energy of 60 to 100 Joules per centimeter squared, so thank you very much.