Back hair and upper arm hair removal (50 yr old male)

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#1

Hello I am new to this forum, but I wanted to relate my experience with electrolysis for the last decade and see if anyone on this forum can provide me with some insights. I am an Asian male, 50 years old, and I have had electrolysis done on my back and upper arms for the last 10 years. My back and upper arms were very hairy and they would cause folliculitis and acne breakouts.

After doing laser for a few years on these areas, I found that laser does not work in treating male back hair or upper arm hair. The hair grew right back within a few months. The first laser they used was a
diode laser which hurt a lot and produced no results. I went to a 2nd laser center and they used the candela yag laser which was virtually painless. However, results were only temporary. I gave up on laser and decided to do electrolysis. I started going once a week for 3 years, and then switched to twice a month for the next six years.( this was due to time and money issues). The sessions were 45 minutes long. After that, for the last 2 years I have been going to sessions once a month for half an hour and I am now almost 100 percent hair free. For the first 8 years the electrologist used the blend method on me and for the last 2 years I have been getting thermolysis done.

I have a few questions I hope someone here can answer: does 10 years of electrolysis for full back and upper arm hair removal sound like too long of a time for this process? Or is this normal considering my age and the frequency of electrolysis visits? Also, if I had gotten electrolysis done much sooner ( with once or twice a week visits) possibly 24 years ago when I was 26 years old, (when the hair was just starting to appear) would I have been done with this process much sooner with permanent results, or would I still have had to deal with new hair growth showing up in my late 40’s? I hope someone here can help me with answers to these questions. Any of your replies are greatly appreciated. Thank you.

diode laser which was painful and produced no relult

#2

Testosterone continues to stimulate follicles that have never generated hair before to do so throughout your adult life time. While it certainly would have been possible to clear the initial growth with more frequent or more time doing electrolysis and ensuring all hair is removed within all cycles of growth, the reality is this much treatment over such a period is outside most peoples time and budget. Taking longer is not a bad thing by any means. The hormones at play however would still be active in your system and this would likely require periodic touchups to keep it that way. That said, this is usually less than the amount of time spent on the initial growth, and is at a much lesser time and cost than clearing initial growth.We dont have anything like before , during or after photos so we only have your recollection to go by to judge how much hair was there or give any kind of judgement about whether time frames and treatment was reasonable for your particular case.

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#3

I agree with the above.

One point I will make is that we usually measure treatment in terms of total hours or total treatment time, and it’s typical to spread those hours over an 18 or 24 month period (minimum) because of the hair growth cycle. If you can’t fit all those hours of treatment into 18 or 24 months, then you have to spend more months and years on treatment, but in the end, the total treatment time shouldn’t be significantly different either way.

If your back and arms needed, for example, 300-400 hours of treatment in total, but you could only do an hour per treatment, then based on the schedule you followed, it makes sense that it would take around 10 years. Since budget and time were issues for you, you did the best you could.

#4

Thank you for your reply. I just wanted to state that from the time that I was 26 through 34 years of age, I had a lot of hair growth on my back and upper arms. The hairs would grow very long and they would grow back very fast after I shaved them. I estimated that I have been through almost 345 hours in total for electrolysis treatments. So you still believe this is a normal time frame for hair removal for both full back and upper arms? For some reason I still feel like I could have wrapped this up in half the time if I went for 2x a week sessions for 1 hour over the course of 4 to 5 years. Just curious about your take on this.

#5

Dense hair in a large treatment area? Yes, over 300 hours is not surprising, especially when working with blend. If you had doubled the sessions per week, then you could have finished sooner, but it would still take the same number of hours. It can be difficult to find electrologists who will work for 3+ hours per week though, and budget and time is obviously a concern for most people.

It’s good that you’re now very close to the end.

#6

There is something else though that I wanted to mention. It did seem that once my back hair started coming in in the late 90’s when I was 25 or 26, it had not completely grown out, because several years later, it seemed that new hair growth came in during 2005 through 2006. And that hair growth seemed much more agressive in terms of length and density. So like you mentioned before, if i completed the 345 hours of elctrolysis in 24 months, it seems possible that I would have had to go back to electrolysis again for several years later in 2005 to clear new patches of hair growth that were coming in at the time. I wonder how many more years of electrolysis would I have had to go through if I had to return back to electrolysis after the initial clearing in 2000 through 2001. I appreciate your reply.

#7

Electrolysis is best measured in hours spread out over the course of 18-24 months. If you have a treatment area, the goal is to have it cleared every 6 weeks over 18-24 months to complete the process. Sometimes it will take longer depending on several factors including electrologists’ skill, treatment schedule and if your body is developing more hair in the treatment area. A lot of people cannot commit to such schedule due to financial constraints or not having time for weekly appointments.

I started developing back hair around 27 years and at 29 I began treatments around 2016 when hairs were still not as dark and course. I think it took around 4-5 hours to complete upper and lower back clearances at first. I would make 2 hour appointments max per session twice or 3x a week. If area is cleared I would go back every 4-6 weeks and continue the schedule. Appointment hours per session reduced over 2 years and I think I was done 3 years after I started. The upper back was easiest area to clear and see results. The lower back was an issue as it was very painful even with lidocaine so it required short sessions under 40 minutes and more frequent appointments during the week. I think I completed my back treatments end of 2018 and my back hasn’t been developing much visible hair.

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#8

Removal of hair with all modalities is hours invested. 10 hrs can be invested over 10 years or 1 month. However as a timeframe, working with multi needle (32 probes) only for complete removal on a full back and shoulders densely coated with hair we usually complete the removal in 18 months. During this time we would complete approx 200-250 hours.