With the warm-weather season fast approaching, chances are you’re about to increase the frequency and extent of your hair removal routine. Whether you shave, wax, pluck, or all the above, summer’s skin-baring arrival often means spending more time, energy, and money getting rid of unwanted hair than you did during the winter.
It doesn’t have to be this way: With a series of highly targeted laser hair removal sessions, you can achieve permanently smooth, hair-free skin virtually anywhere.
Laser hair removal is one of the most popular cosmetic treatments at Cosmetico MedSpa, and for good reason — after all, why keep buying costly razor blades or scheduling intimate Brazilian wax appointments when a few noninvasive laser treatments are all it takes to get rid of unwanted hair for good?
Here, Dr. Nidal Hasan explains how laser hair removal works, and what it can do for you.
Laser hair removal is a noninvasive aesthetic procedure that uses highly targeted energy to effectively deactivate unwanted hair follicles and help you attain smooth, hair-free skin on just about any part of your body or face.
To perform laser hair removal, we systematically pass an FDA-approved Nd:YAG handheld laser device over the treatment area. As the laser moves across the surface of your skin, it delivers ultra-rapid pulses of heat energy into every active-growth hair follicle it encounters.
This targeted burst of energy is readily absorbed by the follicle’s pigments, or the melanin cells that give your hair its color. As the laser energy quickly superheats the melanin cells from the inside out, it “flips the switch” on their ability to grow hair, effectively disabling them.
Laser hair removal works best on darker hair that contains higher concentrations of melanin cells to soak up the laser’s switch-flipping heat. Lighter hair, on the other hand, has far fewer pigments available to draw in the thermal, deactivating energy.
So, what does this mean for you? It means the laser hair removal device can often fully eliminate dark hair on the bikini area, back, toes, or underarms, but is only likely to thin and reduce areas of light hair, such as facial peach fuzz or fair forearm hair.
Laser hair removal can help you reduce or eliminate almost any area of undesired hair — whether you’re a woman who’s tired of shaving her legs, waxing her bikini area, and plucking stray chin hairs, or you’re a man who’s self-conscious about dense back or chest hair.
This safe, fully customizable treatment is an easy way to get smooth, hair-free skin on your:
Popular laser hair removal treatment areas for women include the upper lip, chin, bikini area, and legs; men typically use the treatment to attain smooth, hair-free skin on their chest, back, and shoulders.
So, where can’t you use laser hair removal? The only area it’s off limits (for safety reasons) is around your eyes, which means you’ll have to keep waxing or plucking those fast-growing brows.
The hair growth-shed cycle is divided into four distinct phases:
At any given time, 85-90% of the hair follicles on your face and body are in the active-growth phase. When it comes to laser hair removal, this is to your advantage — the laser only targets active-growth follicles.
To ensure we’re able to “switch off” all the hair follicles in a treatment area, you must undergo multiple laser hair removal sessions for several weeks.
To increase the likelihood that all follicles in the targeted area have enough time to hit their growth phase, you can expect to have about three to six treatments, with at least four weeks between sessions.
Winter is an ideal time to go through the laser hair removal process for one reason: It’s important to avoid exposing the treatment area to the sun’s harmful ultraviolet (UV) light before and after each session.
That said, it’s possible to safely undergo the laser hair removal process at any time, provided you follow Dr. Hasan’s pre- and post-treatment skin care guidelines.
Most people see a 10-25% reduction in hair after their first laser hair removal treatment. By the time you reach the last session in your treatment plan, you can expect to have smooth, hair-free skin that stays that way indefinitely.
To learn what laser hair removal can do for you, call or click online to schedule a visit at your nearest Cosmetico MedSpa office in Munster, Indiana, or Orland Park, Illinois, today.
