Can electrolysis practitioners also get out ingrowns?

I’ve had 9 IPL treatments on my back and three on my hole body. Now when the hairs have become much thinner all of them can’t penetrate the skin when growing out and the become ingrowns. This happens mosly on the upper part of my back and my chest. I get big uggly inflammations and sometimes the hair never comes out but stays in the skin like a dark spot.
Now I wonder if electrolysis practitioners are also trained to get out ingrowns with their sterile needles.
Also, what happenes to a hair that gets trapped under the skin. I’ve heared that they get dissolved by the body but my own experience is that they actually don’t get dissolved and stay in the skin for ever.

Things that cause ingrowns are plucking, waxing, close shaving, partial electrolysis and irritations such as tight clothing, squeezing, and pinching of the skin. Hairs can also be trapped in acne. Some people are just suscepticle to developing ingrowns because of the type of hair they have.

Some electrologists are timid about digging for those ingrown hairs and some are not. As a practicing electrologist, I do go digging for those ingrowns all the time. It slows me down a bit, but treating the ingrown with electrolysis is a permanent cure.

The skin above the ingrown is gently probed to gain access. One must use a sterile probe or sterile pointy tweezers to release the hair. You can buy sterile lancets, also,to accomplish this. If the skin is not too inflammed and irritated, then electrolysis can be performed right then and there. If there is pus and a lot of redness, then electrolysis should be deferred until the skin calms down.

You can try exfoliating everyday or use chemical exfoliants like Tend Skin or Bikini Zone to release those hairs, too.

Ingrowns usually correct themselves within a few days to weeks. Deep, resistant ones may take months or the expertise of a physician using a sterile blade to cut the skin and remove the hair.

Dee

You are wondering whether electrologists are trained to get ingrowns out with thier needles.

Ask your electrologist. Just because some do doesn’t mean that they are trained or that is a practice allowed by law. Not all ingrowns are readily released. But some are.

You say Sweden so check with the locals and see what they feel comfortable with. If someone hesitates they may want to avoid causing scars that can be caused by “digging”.

Can you get a product called follique.

Is the IPL causing skin growth over your follicles?

Thankyou Dee and learner for your advices.
No, the IPL does not make skin grow over the follicles…what I see is that the hair has become so thinn and weak that sometimes it can’t penetrate the skin (I think mostly where the skin is thick, upper part of back and chest). Most of them get out with time but some are trapped, and they cause hyperpigmentation that takes maybe two months or more to go away.

As to “digging” the hairs out with a sterile probe. I don’t think that this should be so hard becuase if I squeeze my skin gently I can see the trapped har and I don’t think that I will get I scar from the thinn probes that electrolysis practitioners use. And I don’t think that you realy have to digg, but I guess I can’t bee the judge of that.

The thing about a physician cutting the skin sounds awfull. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />
Wouldn’t that surely leave a scar?

I do have Tend skin and I use it on some spots but I am not so sure how I should use it to get the best effect.
Also yestarday I bought peeling gloves.

And a last thing, about the body dissolving ingrown hairs, is this true? My experience is that it isn’t, but maybe you know better.

Hi:

I think that ingrowns are caused by distorted hair follicles such as you get in plucking hairs.

My electrolygist removes these when she can, or leaves them till she can get them out without digging too deep.
I believe what the other poster meant by digging is to get at those which are close to the surface without causing skin damage. Most of the time the skin is inflamed there anyways, and very thin.

Alicia

Today my Blend practitioner took out some ingrowns that were inflammations on my upper back.
But I have old ingrowns that she said is better to leave alone because digging for those could leave scars. Those old ingrowns won’t come out because while they were trapped under the skin, I underwent IPL treatment which killed them so they can’t grow any more and have just stayed under the skin and can be felt like hard bumps. What can be done with these? If I just let them be, will I always have these hard bumps? Or will they come closer to the surface with time?

I’m so frustrated that I have to get these problems, like I don’t have enough problems with beeing hairy and paying so much many for IPL and Blend. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />
No I also have to be ashamed of my inflammated and bumpy skin, not just the hairyness. Some people just don’t have any luck.

Also about exfoliating, isn’t it bad to do it every time one takes a shower? I mean for the skin.

iranianboySweden, can you take pictures of ingrowns and post them on here? I would really like to see how bad they are.

Hi OhGodWhyMe. I would take pictures if I had a digital camera, but I don’t. The old ingrowns that got trapped because they were treated with IPL before getting a chanse to grow out looks like little bumps (not very little, you can clearly feel a hard spot) and the skin on them is a little “shiny” like in a scar. But when these are new, many of them are big dark inflammations filled with pus and blood and the area around them hurts. Like the one my Blend practitioner fixed yesterday on my right shoulder/back, it was so big and so sore that I had to be careful when sleeping on that side at night. And she squeezed out so much pus and blood…

I really don’t know how to handle this issue, and I imagine that in maybe a year my back will look like hell with hundreds of hard bumps from ingrowns.

Do you have a scanner? Or do you know someone who has a digital camera or scanner and will let you use it? But hey you’re Iranian, so you should be able to afford a digital camera! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> (I’m half Iranian!)

I would love to see your big dark pus-filled inflammations! You asked in another post if it’s bad to exfoliate everyday, and I say it depends what kind of exfoliating body wash you are using. I use Neutrogena Body Scrub everyday. (The bottle says to use it everyday) I’ve been using it everyday for 5 months now. It’s good for acne-like ingrown hairs such as your pus-filled inflammations. What kind of exfloliating body scrub are you using? Is it a salt scrub or a sugar scrub or something else?

BTW, are you seeing an electrolysis just for getting rid of ingrowns or are you getting actual electrolysis on your back too?

hehe well I would afford a digital camera if I didn’t have to pay so much for IPL.
I don’t use exfoliating body wash, I use loofa gloves with regular soap.
I do Blend on two small areas above my collar bones and towards the neck where I have had IPL induced hair growth.

Now I have been very good at exfoliating with loofa gloves for two weeks and I use Tend skin on the problem are two to three times a day. But now the hairs are growing out and I see that several are still getting trapped although I am doing everything I can to help them up. I can se how they are starting to form cyst like bumps! Stupid hair genes!

Oi! By just using an exfoliating loofah gloves, you’re irritating the skin. If you’re going to use a hand loofah, then it’s best to use it with a body scrub wash. I’m sure there must be some store in Sweden that sells exfoliating body wash scrub.

But I’m using them with water and soap in the shower.
When I bought the gloves the woman said that I can use them with ordinary soap.
She said that if I buy the gloves the body wash is not necessary.
I just followed her directions.

You can try exfoliating everyday or use chemical exfoliants like Tend Skin or Bikini Zone

Dee, which specific Bikini Zone product are you referring to? I searched on the web and they offer several products from shaving gel, after shaves, etc.

I wonder, does anyone, ordinary people or professional electrolysis practitioners, have experience with what happenes to a ingrown hair that creates a bump if you can’t get the hair out and just let it be?
Do they “melt away”(don’t know how to say it in english) or will you always have a mark and a hyperpigmentation?

I wonder, does anyone, ordinary people or professional electrolysis practitioners, have experience with what happenes to a ingrown hair that creates a bump if you can’t get the hair out and just let it be?

My grandfather had a cyst taken off his back that was about the size of a grape or olive. When he finally had it taken off, it was a curled up ball of hair that had been growing for years and years and years.

On me, ingrowns get real sore, real fast and I don’t ever expect something like that to happen to me.

That’s strange, becuase a hair on the back doesn’t grow for years and get that long. Maybe what your grandfather had was some other phenomenon and not ordinary ingrown.

So you mean that your trapped ingrowns remain as bumps for ever if you can’t take it out of the skin? I didn’t understand.

If hair is stuck in place, and never sheds, it can reactivage when the follicle comes back in phase. I have removed ingrown hairs that were 6 to 12 inches long from places like the back, chest, neck and face.

I see, it sound scarry.

But how do you get these deep ingrowns out mr Walker?

The hair that now become ingrowns in my skin are very fine because of IPL treatments, and it seems like fine ingrown hairs are almost impossible to find and take out. I tried with a needle and almost massacred one bump open and still didn’t find the hair!
(I don´t understand why laser practitioners don’t warn you that if you make the hairs too thin they will give rise too bad and many ingrowns that makes you look like a freek and also makes it impossible to start waxing again because then you will get even more ingrowns because the hairs are permanently thinner)This has realy become a extremely big issue for me because at least before I knew I could wax and get a smooth back for two weeks without permanent inflammations becuase of ingrowns. Now I don´t know if I dare to wax again! Maybe after every waxing I will get this ingrowns and soon look like a snake!

My hair is realy a issue for me, I worry so much for the future that I can´t eat and I have lost so much weight that everybody get chocked over how thin I´ve become - I weigh now only 54 kg. I always used to weigh between 65-69 kg, and the least I’ve ever weighed after becoming fullgrown is 60 kg.

My mother says I need to go to a psychologists, but a phsycologists can’t remove hair. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" />
I have been to one through my university, but really, she didn’t have much of a solution for anything.

Will I allways have the bumps?
I can se that they have become much smaller and less inflammated but the hairs are still in the skin and the skin still hard (a bump). In some bumps I can see that the hair need to grow more because it’s visible at the top, but other bumps are just bumps and you can’t see the least trace after the hair, just hyperpigmentation etc.

It seems like one issue with the hair now after IPL can be that it grows so slowly, and maybe that gives too many of them enough time to grow wrong on their way through the skin? Or maybe I’m thinking wrong and it’s only because they are thin.

Some people are just prone to having ingrowns, IBS. When the hair is permanently destroyed then ingrowns won’t be a problem anymore and that is what you are trying to accomplish. Without looking backwards too far in these long posts, have you had treatment with a nd:Yag laser instead of IPL? I’m not the expert on LASER, but it’s my impression that IPL is like long term waxing and a quality LASER can afford you some permanency to rid you of hair that causes ingrowns. Lagirl or RCJ wll have to help out on this one.

It seems to me that one or a few recent clinical studies have shown great promise for ingrowns if one uses a quality LASER for permanent hair reduction along with benzol peroxide with a clindamycin gel.

I know this is a big issue for you, but I think that after reading a very long thread, that most everything has been said that can be said about ingrowns and questions that haven’t been answered may not have a definite answer.

You have analyzed your own situation very well
and all your ponderings about what maybe happening sound very plausible to me.

It’s all very well and good to keep a healthy balance when we think about our problems, no matter how big or small they seem. I hope you don’t feel too nervous about this ingrown situation. It is good for you to ask questions to try and figure this out and there are many that would like to help you out any way possible, but personally, I don’t have anything else to offer at this point except my listening ear.

Dee

The sodium hydroxide that is produced by the Blend method will help lift out the ingrown hairs. I highly recommend Tend Skin to use between treatments too.