Beard clearance prohibitive. Alternative?

My beard is not sparse, but it is not dense either, but I still want it gone for good. I am encouraged by what I have read here, and would love to do full clearances, but it seems rather expensive. I am a black male with gray hairs in my beard, so l am going for electrolysis. Can someone give me suggestions on a treatment plan that does not require full clearances? Right now I am thinking start at the neck area. Clear and move on to next area. Lastly would it make any sense to do one full clearance. I imagine I could afford to do that, but not every six weeks which is my understanding. Please excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject.

I’m not sure why you ruled out laser. It sounds like it’s because you are black. However, ND:Yag lasers work well on coarse hair on African American skin. That would be a good alternative, at least to start, so you can get as much killed with those quicker cheaper treatments as possible first. Then you can finish with electrolysis if you want as money permits.

What is the goal of your hair removal? If you want it all gone for good, it’s not likely to happen if you’re not a transgendered person on medication that prevents new growth. Otherwise, you’ll need touchups later for any new hair your body develops.

If you want to do only electrolysis from the start, it is in your best interest to get clearances. If you don’t, you’ll be paying for retreating some of the same hair and treating hair in the wrong phase of growth at each treatment.

Are you saying that with time and effort I could not remove beard permanently unless on medications? I thought electrolysis could give permanent results.

Greetings Pygoman. You and I both share the opinion that you should go directly to Electrolysis. What one full clearance would do for you is to give you a permanent reduction of all hair in the treatment area, and 3 weeks of living like you were finished. After that, you can put the resources you have into keeping the problem areas clear, which for most men of color are the jawline down through the neck.

While you are clearing the neck and up to the jawline, you can have the mask area shaped to give a clean look (like Wil Smith has) and if you choose to, get the cheeks and chin removed later.

As the time it takes to reclear your area from the jaw line down decreases, you may want to start adding in more of the cheeks, or chin area. Just make sure you can get full clearance of what ever area you are going to do within the space of six weeks. This is the key reason those who come to me are willing to travel. We clear out all of the area in the treatment area in the time they are here, even though that may bake multiple hours (or all day) in some cases. It is much better than what one gets from doing an hour a week, or month to infinity.

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Hi, LAgirl. Do you say a man who wouldn´t change to a woman ( being under hormonal medication) couldn´t get rid of his beard? Or did you mean any body hair?

James, would I have to do full clearances every 6 weeks if I chose that route? I agree an hour or two a week seems like it would take decades to effect change. I would like to start at the jaw/neck area and rid that of hair as fast as possible.

What I mean is that the body will continue developing NEW hair. So electrolysis or laser kills hair that’s currently there permanently. BUT it can’t prevent your body from producing NEW hair after you’re done with this. A male face is a highly hormonal area. On other areas, it’s not as much of an issue.

In order to get to final clearance, one has to treat every growing hair, at least once, while it is in its growing phase. One would have to get a full clearance at least every 12 weeks to do this, but faster time to finish occurs with full clearances at least once every 6 to 8 weeks.

I have cleared men who never took hormones of their beards, so it is possible to do.

Got your point, LAgirl. In the long term, beard area has the most chances to win the “It grew back” award.

What about for females? Is there a chance that the hair on my jaw line will “grow back” when I’m done with electrolysis. If so, then what’s the point of spending hundreds of dollars electrolysis when I’ll always have hair in that area anyways. I may as well stick to cheap methods-threading, waxing, etc.

Anyone going to address Brush’s question?

Half a year later?

I doubt that she will expect an answer. Anyway, it seemed to me more a rhetoric question. That’s why i did not respond to it.

YorLooks - if You are interested in the answer:

what we can do is kill hairs which are actively part of the growing cycle.

Any woman has, however, the potential to grow as much hair (body/facial) as any man. Usually this is triggered by hormonal changes such as the menopause.

So in practice it is always possible that NEW hair is being formed when a major change of the hormonal situation occurs. Possible does not necessarily mean that it will happen. It might happen.

Again: this is always NEW hair, and it is always the amount of hair that would be formed MINUS the hair that has already been killed. So it is usually an easy and small job to clear those few hairs from time to time as they develop. If they develop at all.

The following is a paragraph from an unpublished book I was working on for the public. The point is that if a man has a fully developed beard — YES, it most certainly can be permanently removed. I have done about 100 of them — probably more, but I’d rather …

From "Consumer’s … "

Hairs develop — about 5 million of them — during the third to fourth month of pregnancy and cover the fetus evenly. Because the fetus’s head is huge and the body tiny, we end up with more hair concentrated on our head (as the body grows, hairs get separated). These fluffy hairs are called lanugo [Latin: downy] hairs and are shed at the time of birth; then quickly replaced. Excessive lanugo hair, seen after delivery, is not a concern; it falls out within a few days. Surprisingly, all of us are born with a predetermined amount of hair that we will have for life. We cannot develop new hair follicles!

The hair won’t “grow back”. NEW hair may be developed if the growth is caused by something in the body that is not controlled (with medication etc).

So, is it not possible to adhere to this advice with one hour per week to clear a distinct region? If my face is divided into no more than 12 regions (yes, 6-8 preferred), treating each in sequence on a weekly basis would be a valid approach to implement your method, no?

If it were possible to clear out all of the significant hairs in these divisions in one hour, then one could do one hour a week and eventually get finished.

What I want you to consider is the reality that if one could clear an entire beard in 12 hours (sure, I have done it for some lucky people), why would one do one hour a week, instead of 3 hours a day on 4 days as close together as possible? Then, one could maintain the look of being clear with 3 hours of work on 2 or 3 days every 2 to 3 weeks.

The only flaw I see in your idea is that we don’t know how many hairs need to be treated, nor the capability of the electrolysis practitioner to remove enough hair before the next phase of hair growth starts, and the phase that was being worked on has begun falling out due to natural shedding.

Mike’s notion is that even this is not actually new hair but in any case hair that we have been given before birth.

But anyway, that hair (You mentioned as well as i did) is apparently new because it is hair that had been changed early in our lives from lanugo state to dormant state and had not been awakened yet.

I guess the real difference is between significant hairs, and insignificant hairs. There are the ones that are thick and sharp enough to pop a balloon, and those that you can’t feel even if you lick the skin. What we are usually asked to work on in this business are the hairs somewhere in between the two.