BEWARE electrolysis on eyebrows!

I am so upset. I’ve had my eyebrows treated 3 times over a month’s time and the electrologist messed them up. I’ve been plucking my brows since I was 15 and have never let anyone else touch my eyebrows before, but I drew a thick outline with eyebrow pencil very conservatively, leaving outside only a few hairs that I was sure I would never want. She was arrogant and disrespectful enough to ignore my directions and pluck whatever she wanted, then she wiped off the lines before letting me see the results at the end so I couldn’t tell right away. Now my eyebrows are overplucked, assymetrical, and badly shaped. I had been growing out my eyebrows for months to try to get to my ideal shape, and now for the rest of my life I will have messed up eyebrows at this time of year (and perhaps for several months out of the year, as overplucked eyebrows can take 6 months to grow back, and the hairs she treated aren’t ever coming back). I am so angry at her and don’t want to give her anymore of my money, which is too bad in a way because she is very good at areas where she can satisfy her impulse to pluck every single hair, but I can’t go back to someone who did this to me. So I have to find a new electrologist and probably I will have to travel out of the city and chance having to waste time and money with another electrologist who doesn’t know how to treat hairs effectively.

So my warning to all of you who value your looks, is to not let anyone touch your brows. It’s not worth it, and there’s no way to know who to trust. This woman has glowing reviews on Yelp, and a woman on Yelp told me she was great at brows and respectful about not taking too much off. She is very professional and skilled at electrolysis, and YET she did this.

And if any of the electrologists on the board can give your professional opinion, please: Is there any chance that eyebrow hairs can grow back looking normal if they were treated with blend by a skilled electrologist? If I was treated from mid-Oct to mid-Nov, when do you think I will not have enough eyebrow hairs each year? At this same time, or earlier, or for several months?

Lastly, any recs for good electrologists in the Bay Area?

Thanks.

oh nelly.

I have repeated many times that it is not the act of getting electrolysis that is the problem, but the person behind the “wheel” doing the proceedure. Your case is particularly troubling because she is skilled, but don’t throw every electrologist into the pile. People need to get their eyebrows done and there are plenty of success cases.

The subject of the post is misleading. I’m not saying this in a scoldy way to you, candela as I realize how very upset you are with this electrologist. I don’t know what else you could have done to communicate well with her. You should have been offered a mirror so you could have watched and directed. It would be wise for clients to bring a mirror to their session and work with the electrologist since eyebrows mean so much to the way we look. This is a good lesson for clients and any electrologists reading this post.

Just sit back and wait to see what grows in and maybe this will settle out for you in a couple months. No one can predict a good outcome as I’m sure you understand. One of my clients who located here from Marin County used Vera. I think her last name begins with a “W”. She seemed very pleased with her work and from my vantage point with my surgical magnification, her upper lip skin looks great. I think others were mentioned here on hairtell, just do a search and remember that you are in the drivers seat, so watch any future eyebrow treatments that are being performed on you.

Dee

This IS Vera Weiler who did this to my brows.

When you say no one can predict a good outcome, do you mean there is no chance that those hairs will grow back?

It’s hard to believe that 3 treatments could ruin my brows for the rest of my life, but that’s what I’m fearing as I had been growing out my eyebrows for months to try to fix their shape and it took forever to get some of them back, and now they’re most likely gone forever.

Can anyone tell what results they’ve seen on areas that have been treated for only a month or another short amount of time before treatment was stopped? How much hair was gone the next year?

Or if people have had their eyebrows done, did you ever have to treat regrowth, or did the hairs die the first time?

How could I or anyone else possibly know the answer to your regrowth questions. If I say yes the previously treated hairs will grow back don’t worry, then you wouldn’t take me seriously because you know that I can’t predict the future. I can point out that it is good that you had three treatments as opposed to 13 treatments. Maybe there are new hairs underneath that will fill in for any hairs that have been affected permanently by those first three treatments. Are your eyebrows really thin now? Do you feel like submitting a picture, candela?

hi there well from my opinion i had electrolysis treatment on eyebrows and i’ve been overtreated - which means that my “electrolgist” isn’t professional…but what I wanted to say that even now on those pits i need to remove some of new little hairs which are constantly growing bask…of course they are few which are back not all of them…maybe you can shave the area to encourage those little tiny invisible hairs to become thicker…
sorry for my english i hope youll understand me…

Ivmi, dear, shaving will have no effect on the hair growth,

Actually, the bad news is that the eyebrow is one of two places on the body that shaving could actually cause permanent hair removal (due to slicing/tiling away all the skin that contains the follicle. On most body areas, the angle of the hair is too steep for this to happen, but on the eyebrow it is possible due to the follicle laying almost parallel to the skin at a shallow angle).

They are not really thin but they are too thin for my face and the shape is all messed up. I don’t have hairs where I should have hairs. On one brow it’s like she was trying to do an upside down V shape and she took off all these hairs from the first half of the brow. It really looks strange. I even felt her putting the needle where I had thick hair and I thought that that couldn’t be right but I didn’t say anything because who wants to accuse their electrologist of not being capable of respecting an outline, especially if your choices of electrologists are limited?

Then she took too much off the top of the arch of the other one, and she took too much off the top of the other brow, so it’s too low. And on one side she took off too much from the beginning of the brow, so that side is thinner than and not level with the other side.

I’ve been trimming to try to even the brows out, but there’s only so much I can do with that kind of mess.

It’s sad because I take so much pride in my appearance, and now I’ll always have this flaw.

Thanks for the info ivmi. For how long did you get treatments on your eyebrows, and how long has it been since you stopped?

ok I am not an expert but I know from my experience that when I shave my hair that they become thicker…but ok if you say so dee…
candela i had 8 treatment and now it passed 7 months from last treatment…every person is different…I don’t know what to tell you…I know that my girlfriends once told me that if I wax my hair that there is possibility that they will disappeare in time, but if not that they will definently become thiner…and that never happend with every waxing - my hair become thicker and thicker…and I really know girls who now dont have hairs after months and years of waxing…so i really don’t know what to tell you. dee I can feel in your post that you think that my post is fulish, but i’m writting from my experience…i just know that whatever I do whith my hairs (twezeng, plucking , waxing they become thicker and darker…)

really sorry to hear this candela :frowning:

i think eyebrows are quite a dangerous area. i mean, most beauticians who wax or thread have little idea about how to shape a brow. yea, they can give it a shape but not necessarily what’s best for the clients face shape, features and type of brow hair. imagine a lot of electrologists have even less experience when it comes to this.

see how it goes. i had my eyebrows treated a little bit, months ago. hairs have come back but they are very fine and i don’t want them removed.

i was very cautious with my brows as i never used to do anything to them and only started plucking them a bit before i started electro there. i would only ask her to do a few hairs during each treatment and point them out to her - the ones that i would ordinarily have plucked. so basically she was replacing my weekly plucking.
i know this is no help to you now :frowning: but hopefully it will help someone else.

i think it’s really important to have a good relationship with one’s electrologist. there should be a mutual respect and understanding. one should be able to talk freely and give feedback.
if i feel something is not right, i’ll ask what she’s doing. she respects that what i want for my face may not be the same as what she would do but will go along with my wishes. if she feels an area needs looking at, she’ll suggest it for the next treatment etc.

Thanks stoppit. I only wanted a few hairs removed each time too. It’s hard to imagine that a beautician could be so disrespectful to something as important to your face as eyebrows, but from now on I will definitely never give an electrologist the benefit of the doubt. I never let anyone else shape my brows. I’ve done them myself since the beginning and over the years I’ve learned the important things about what hairs I need to keep to look best. It’s so upsetting that she chose to shape them when I clearly drew an outline excluding all but a few stray hairs. It shows such arrogance and lack of respect. And this woman on Yelp told me that this electrologist worked on her for more than a year, just doing a few hairs at a time so that she could be sure that she had the shape she wanted.

Something to think about for anyone who would still let an electrologist touch their brows: electrologists seem to me to have a problem with self-control. All 3 electrologists I’ve gone to have picked at my face against my wishes. Again, I don’t pick at my face because I don’t want scars. Yet they pick at blemishes even when I’ve said to just leave them alone. This last electrologist left a red mark above my eyebrow a few weeks ago, so I kept putting concealer on it and waiting for it to heal. Then, the last appointment, at the end when I looked in the mirror it was all red again and with a crater. She said I had had a clog and that I should do more dep cleaning. So once again, I am putting on concealer and hoping that the redness will go down and that the crater won’t scar, ALONG with putting retin-a on my brow area in hopes that hairs will grow back where she overplucked, and feeling depressed when I think about having this awful shape forever.

Thanks ivmi, that gives me some hope although I need regular thick hairs back in some of the places she treated. It’s ridiculous since I always had such strong, thick, dark brows and now I’m in need of hairs. And I always play up my eyes with makeup and now my brows give me a weird look.

Licensed cosmetologists are supposed to learn about shaping eyebrows…if they didn’t…well…it’s not something they will even do every day.

Electrologists are going to work on eyebrows every day. So they SHOULD have more experience than cosmetologists… They’d better pay attention to the training they receive, and the continuing education they have opportunities to attend!

^I didn’t know that Barbara, it’s good to know. I don’t know if it’s the same in England though.

However, I do know all the trouble my friends have had trying to find beauticians that will wax/thread their brows properly (even ones with training). Yes, it’s part of their learning but some people have a talent for doing it well, whilst others don’t.

I would imagine it’s the same for electrologists. If you read some of the other threads here, many in the UK can’t even do electrolysis without messing up people’s skin, so I don’t know what they would do to someone’s brows :frowning:

I don’t know how many electrologists read hairtell, but for any that do, please read and then re-read this important thread. Listening to the client is actually very easy and is a sign of a respecting the other person. I may not agree with the need for hair removal for certain clients, but they are willing to pay me for my time to do what is important to them. If they have copius amounts of blond peach fuzz on their necks and faces, I will keep thinning it until they are comfortable with the look. It is surprising to me that when I think they look great, they want to keep going further. (Note: If an electrologist does not have good to superior magnification then she/he can’t serve these challenging peach fuzzers, thus frustrating the client further).

[color:#000099]Candela[/color], [color:#006600]ivmi[/color] and [color:#CC0000]stoppit[/color] your posts reflect how some? many? clients feel. Electrologists all have different personalities, but aside from that “duh” moment, I do believe that we always need to stay on top of our listening skills. [color:#CC0000]Stoppit, I really liked your post of Nov. 21 at 8:17 pm. This post should be highlighted in every electrolysis education program.[/color] We are working with people, most times very depressed people, not just hair. When the relationship is not strong and the electrologist doesn’t serve the client well, the client can become more depressed. We are not in business to worsen one’s depression! This isn’t only about business and making a decent livelihood for oneself, it is about helping the hairy depressed feel good about themselves. Specifically, we serve the hairy well by setting ourselves up with the best tools available, continuing our education (like Barbara, CPE said in her post above) and learning the art of listening.

Candela, would you be willing to submit a picture of your eyebrows? It’s certainly okay if you don’t want to.

Dee

I’m going to try to do a review of San Francisco electrologists, since I’m going on consults for a new one. And sadly, today I had a terrible experience with Sofia’s.

So, this woman was kind of rude on the phone but turned nice and polite as soon as I called back to book a consultation. Which I did because she has an Apilus and said she used magnification. Her magnification turns out to be a glass thing like glasses but rectangular. She brought out that whole “electrolysis is a process we make the hairs finer over time” BS that I heard from the electrologist who messed up my chin, so that immediately raised a red flag for me. Then, she said a bunch of stuff that didn’t match what you guys here on Hairtell have been telling us: that I shouldn’t clip hairs, that I shouldn’t let them grow more than 1-2 days before treating them, that she has people who come in every 5 days. Then, when I wasn’t buying that, she flipped to say it was ok for me to keep on coming in every 10 days. She wouldn’t give me a straight answer on when I could expect to not see any more coarse hairs, saying that she had to see all my growth, even though I kept telling her that was all I had for 10 days.

Then when I asked her to tell me about similar cases she’d done, she said that usually coarse hairs were gone after 3 months. How could that be when it takes 9 months for every hair to surface? She just did not seem honest at all and so finally I’d heard enough and got up to leave. She said then that she was going to charge for the consultation since she did work on me (3-4 hairs by her own admission). I asked how much and she said $20. I told her I wasn’t going to pay that and when she asked why I told her it wasn’t good business practice as she hadn’t told me there would be a charge and nobody charges for consultations (I was charged $1 for the needle at one place).
So shady!

And also, when she was looking at my face she asked if she could take off my makeup and while I was thinking of how to respond she just took it off my chin and treated the coarse hairs there. Now I’m upset because she probably didn’t treat them properly and so that means that I have yet MORE months to wait before I’m free of coarse hairs, as they’ll most likely be back full force.

So it seems that unless I find somebody honest, I’ll have to go back to the electrologist I’ve been seeing, even though I’m mad at her about my eyebrows, because at least she’s honest about removing hair as long as I can keep her away from my eyebrows. But I do have a few more consults and hopefully I’ll find someone honest.

So, the Apilus experts, please: with machines like that, are you able to kill the hair on the first try/have a good kill rate or is the strategy to make hairs finer over time? Or is that just BS designed to make customers come in over and over and get more of their money?

Renee Yates

Has a Henckels and uses one of those little rectangular glass things for magnification. Does blend. Said I would need 1 more year of treatment to get rid of all coarse hairs. Disagreeable personality. Whe she asked why I was switching electrologists and I told her about my eyebrows, she said that that electrologist was probably just using her own expertise, which is what they’re supposed to do. Oooookaaaaay. Went on about a client she had that she found annoying and finally told to find another electrologist. When I asked if she did test patches, looked annoyed and said she didn’t know what those were, then when I explained refused. Charges $90/hr, NOT getting my money.

Susan Feiga

Uses a Clareblend and no magnification. Pleasant personality. Said that I should hardly have coarse hairs by now and that I should finish in 6 months. Only does thermolysis because it’s quicker. Answers the phone during treatments but said she can not do that if the client requests it. Did a test patch on my cheek. It was painful but that’s probably good as she’s probably using high enough energy to kill hairs. (When I told her about the electrologist who left me with a bunch of coarse hairs on my chin, she said that some electrologists aren’t willing to use high enough energy to kill hairs). I didn’t feel any plucking. For the next hour the spot was bright pink, but later on the redness went down. On the phone she told me she does “flash” thermolysis, but when I asked her about that today she said that flash is the same as regular thermolysis. Understood when I told her about my eyebrows.

By the way, it’s been 11 days and the mark where the electrologist picked at my skin is still pink and still has a crater. I really don’t need an indented scar right above my eyebrow where everyone will notice. That’s such an abuse of the client’s trust as I can’t tell the electrologist is picking since it feels the same as the rest of the time they’re poking you with needles. If I was ASKED, I would say that I don’t want to have my skin picked at for the risk of scarring and because I don’t want to pay $86/hour for that “service”.

Are any of these California electrologists located near you?

http://www.dectro.com/en/directory/apilus/united-states.php

No, but I still have a few people to go to on consults.
Hopefully I’ll find somebody.

Still have the pink indented mark on my forehead. I don’t know what she was thinking, but that is so disrespectful and unprofessional to scar your clients by picking at their skin. If you have to dig with a needle or tweezers or whatever to get something out of the skin, you need to just leave it alone.