Modern women are busier than ever before. Between working full-time jobs, caring for children and sometimes elderly parents, and maintaining lots of caretaking around the house, you probably have your hands full.
Sometimes looking nice can fall into the background, and this includes keeping parts of you hair-free. If you find getting a daily shave into your day to be a challenge, you may be seeking out a more permanent solution. Laser hair removal offers a long-term option to many women that is affordable and can even be done conveniently at home. Here’s what you need to know about your options in laser hair removal.
What is Laser Hair Removal?
Laser hair removal is traditionally conducted by a dermatologist as a medical procedure. There are also very effective at-home options available. Professional and at-home versions work similarly, although professional versions are more powerful, tend to be more painful, and get results more quickly.
A laser, which is a concentrated beam of light, is absorbed by a pigment known as melanin in your hair. The light turns into heat and causes damage to the hair follicles that produce your hair.
These tubular follicles may not recover. The damage keeps hair from growing back, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently. Most of the time, are removal last for a long period but is not permanent. Because the laser is most effective on follicles when they are just starting to produce hair, multiple treatments are generally needed to affect all of the hair as it’s goes through stages of growth.
Generally after between 4 and 8 professional treatments hair can be removed for a long period. When hair grows back, it is generally lighter and finer than it was before. Some women may even find that they don’t feel the need to have the hair removed like they did before.
Advantages of Laser Hair Removal
There are a number of reasons that women choose laser hair removal over other options. Here are few great reasons to try out laser hair removal:
Long-Term Hair Removal
The primary advantage of laser hair removal is how long hair can stay gone. You can get months or even years of smooth, hair-free skin after only a few treatments.
There are really no other options in hair removal that provide this kind of permanent effect. How long laser hair removal lasts for you may be very different than how long it lasts for someone else.
Your type of hair, how fast your hair grows, and how it is affected by the laser will determine how long the effects can last. At it’s best, laser hair removal can last years.
Low Pain
Laser hair removal is not pain-free, but it is much less painful than some other hair removal options with long-term results, such as waxing. You will experience something like a rubber band being struck against your skin or a hot sensation, but you will generally not feel significant discomfort.
At home versions cause significantly less discomfort, on average, than professional versions, because they’re less powerful.
Convenience
If you’re going to the dermatologist to have your laser hair removal done, it is a bit more frustrating, but at least you only have between 4 and 8 treatments to go through. If you’re choosing to remove hair with laser intense pulsed light at home, you will find the treatment even more convenient.
Just treat on your own schedule, monthly to remove hair initially and then as needed to maintain. It’s hard to beat this kind of convenience in at-home hair removal. You will certainly prefer it over the risks associated with at-home waxing.
Limitations of Laser Hair Removal
When laser hair removal first came out, it did not work well on darker-skinned people. It still is not as effective and may have increased risk of damage to skin when the hair and the skin are the same color and of a darker shade. However, laser hair removal has come a long way in providing options for darker-skinned people.
One place that laser hair removal has not been able to progress despite many years of studies is in effectiveness for people with very light-colored hair. People with white, blond, red, or other very light-colored hair will not find laser hair removal to be effective. Often after initial treatment, hair comes back much lighter and finer. It may not be as susceptible to laser hair removal at this time.
Give Laser Hair Removal aTry
Women love laser hair removal for some very good reasons. Laser hair removal can be a highly effective and very safe way to get semi-permanent results.
If getting rid of your hair is an everyday frustration for you, you may find that laser hair removal is the solution you’ve been looking for. A version that you can use at home will make it so much easier to fit hair removal into your life.
