Somebody on a forum claimed this. Is this true?
you know, i can’t really prove it , but i’ve noticed liitle hairs around the area that i’ve been treating (underarms) , but maybe it’s just my imagination…
Some people have reported this “rare” side effect. The heat from the laser may “wake up” certain hairs on certain areas. The hairs the laser wakes can be treated, hopefully, again with laser or you can have eletroloysis. Having darker skin could make the risk higher, but there is still more to be observed and learned about this rare happening.
For certain areas, this doesn’t seem to be a problem and it is not an automatic side effect of laser.
Dee
there is a possibility for certain areas (women’s face, men’s upper arms, shoulders) especially if the hair is sparse and fine, not dark and coarse which is best for laser. Also, darker skin types seem to be more susceptible. this is not an automatic side effect, but it can happen in some people on the above areas.
Is this problem observed in all types of lasers or only a few laser types?
it doesn’t depend on the type of laser.
I haven’t been on this forum for a little while. But I have been doing treatments on upper arms, shoulders, neck and back. I have olive skin, when I first started treatments I had very fine hair on my shoulders and arms and lower back, now it has come back quite thick compared to what it was naturally.
I wish I never started treatments because of this adverse effect. I am telling people out there, because laser is not always the answer.
I’m wondering about labeling this side effect as “rare”. As of lately, I’ve been thinking “percentage” wise, but how would we know if it is not reported to some type of national data base? It just seems to occur more than I’d like to hear for men in certain areas. Any thoughts anyone?
Yes, it can, and it does. I’ve mostly read of it inducing hair growth on areas such as the shoulders, upper arms, and sometimes the back. It happened to me, and I’ve read on boards about countless other people who it has effected. Personally, I think the laser manufacturers should be held liable. It is very hard to prove because you can always make up other factors but when I signed a waiver it NEVER said the hair may grow stronger as a side effect of the laser. It did say it might not work, but never in my wildest dreams would a man in perfect health like myself think that I would have a forest of hair on my shoulders and upper arms a mere 3-4 years later.
Oh great, someone else had a result like me. I totally agree it has stimulated alot more growth than it took away. And the growth is alot thicker than before I ever started.
Having said this, I did shave my arms a couple of years ago, and not i am a lot hairier than before I shaved. Now it could be the shaving of hair that has stimulated in areas which previously had fine hair?
Nope, it’s not the act of shaving, lawrence. It’s hormones and a good blood supply. You coincidentally came of age at the same time you shaved. It’s your genetic blueprint kicking in. It was the time for hairs that were going to sprout…do sprout. What you observed was not the result of shaving.
Check out www.hairfacts.com for information about shaving and it’s effect on hair growth. Check out the Trotter study 1928. There have been several studies over the last century and if you would like I could list more.
Dee
I don’t know if we can really determine whether this affect is rare or not through these forums, given the fact that most people who post on forums are looking for answers to a problem they’re experiencing with laser. however, even a small chance would be enough for me personally not to treat these specific areas where people report seeing this effect with laser. that decision would also be combined with the fact that i believe most people operating laser machines don’t know what they’re doing. meaning that recommending to someone here that they do try it on those areas would be putting them at risk of falling into the hands of one of those laser operators.
My personal experience Henry is if you are looking to treat your chest, stomach, or leg areas then I wouldn’t expect to see actual regrowth from laser.
I don’t see any more regrowth in my chest and stomach I don’t think. In fact, I think the stomach is the ONLY region I have seen some reduction. When I mean reduction, I mean 5-10% max. Usually I read about and have experienced laser hair stimulation by shoulder hair, upper arm hair, and occasionally back hair.
I wish I could tell you why some areas don’t respond as well as others, and in some cases cause more hair to grow there. Anybody else have any ideas other than high testosterone and insulin as this is not a factor in my case, and many other males I’ve talked to about this issue.
I’m going to quickly reply to this and suggest that you look for other posts I’ve made here and on the cosmetic hair removal forum (or whatever it is called) for details.
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You are born with all the hair you will ever have. You never create new hair during your life.
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Hair that was dormant can and will start growing during your life. Whether all of it will grow or not is unknown and depends on many factors. But the best example of this is puberty.
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There are hairs that will never grow during your lifetime or may not grow until you are much older.
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Heat and trauma can stimulate hair to grow that is dormant. This is something lasers seem to be able to do. But there are other things like hormones that can do this.
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Lasers can also synchronize hair, ie put hairs into the same cycle making it look like there are more hairs. We routinely see people with twice as many hairs growing during the 2nd to 4th treatments for this reason. This is different from #4.
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Hairs that are dormant and now growing may or may not stop growing at some point. We’ve never tested for that. But it is possible if you wait several cycles (a couple of years or so) that the extra hair that started growing may go away. Or not. No one knows.
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These hairs can be treated with laser hair removal (or electrolysis)
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People tend to forget how much hair they have and often confuse “more hair than I started with” with “less hair than they really had.” In other words, we’ve had situations where clients think they have all the hair and then some come back and when we check it against photographs it is clear that there has been a significant reduction. I am not suggesting that this is what is happening in your cases, just that this happens enough that it can’t be discounted.
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I know of no mechanism which can cause otherwise fine hairs to grow thicker. This would require that the follicular unit would need to double or quadruple the number of matrix follicular cells and I don’t know how that would occur. Not saying that it can’t, just that I’ve never seen proof or a good rationale as to how it would work. So without an explanation it is difficult to determine casuality.
No. It does not make hair thicker or more hair growth. I had that concern early while being treated with the laser. The fact is that I thought I was seeing more hairs, at first but over time I could see how much less hair I have now. The only thing I would say though is that I needed more treatments then they suggested before getting the results. It’s a good thing I have a 2 year guarantee.
it is not a “rare” side effect, i am afraid. the 99% of people i know, including myself, have experienced more hair growth as a side effect. all types of lasers & IPL can cause it. i have seen hair growing coarser and also hair appearing in adjacent areas where no hair existed before. i dont know what it does to follicles to cause this.
i am wondering WHY do people still resort to laser as a means of hair removal? no doctor can verify that laser is safe in terms of causing skin cancer. they say it needs decades of trial to be certain. more hair growth. oother adverse effects include: broken capilaries, erythema, burns. some people even complain about collagen destruction, fat loss, and general bad skin condition as a result from lasers. also i have read that it can destroy glands that produce sweat and oil.
it seems that it does everything but to remove hair! i can understand why industries still manufacture lasers. i can understand why doctors and beauticians try to talk people into lasers. in a world of no ethics and no morals where money is the supreme value, it is understandable. BUT consumers why? why still buy laser removal??
because people who are desperate enough to remove the hair don’t care about potential side effects that are not proven. why do people have plastic surgery? and there are a lot more complications with that - it’s SURGERY. this isn’t. if it’s something that you cannot live with and it really affects your life, and it WORKS, then people will do it.
and to answer your question from a personal experience, i have had GREAT results that i wouldn’t have gotten from any other method. it does work and can change someone’s life. that’s why people do DO it. because it does work for some and the results are great. the problem is that a lot of clinics are in it for the money, and would treat anyone who comes in as long as they pay even when results can’t be provided for that person (and those are usually the same people who don’t know how to use the machine to actually achieve results). so the generalization you are making is not about laser in general, it’s about the fact that the industry is not where it needs to be. a lot of clinics are not educated and dishonest and are in it to make money. then, when they fail to achieve what they advertise, the entire industry gets blamed for ineffectiveness of laser as a whole.
I pray for you lagirl.
I hope you won’t get skin cancer after 10, 20 who knows how many years. It will be very very sad that you’ll need to take chemotherapy and face the probability of death by skin cancer just because once when you were young, when people
didn’t know what laser could cause were having it to remove their hair. Trade a few insignificant hair for cancer.
My dermatologist asked a laser manufacturer: can it cause cancer? and the manufacturer replied: who cares? smoking causes cancer too and yet people still smoke.
if you look around, nowdays almost everything causes cancer, down to the food you’re eating everyday. and that’s pretty much proven at this point. everything that’s genetically altered is probably not very good for you. tanning at salons is obviously not good and there is one on every block, meaning that plenty of people are using them on an everyday basis. all the initial tests and research, if you look it up, shows that hair removal lasers do not cause cancer. I was just pointing out that, of course, there is a possibility because there is just no way to tell at this stage in the game. But I don’t think the possibility is that great, especially in my case since I only had treatments on small areas, bikini and underarms, and only 5-6 sessions. What we know for a fact is that at least 10 years since hair removal lasers have been used, noone has gotten cancer that was associated with laser hair removal lasers. And you know what? Even if someone does get cancer at some point, having had a few laser hair removal treatments, it will be really impossible to tell for a fact what exactly caused it due to everything else that we’re using nowdays, from food we eat to the air we breathe to sun exposure.
I pray for you lagirl.
I hope you won’t get skin cancer after 10, 20 who knows how many years. It will be very very sad that you’ll need to take chemotherapy and face the probability of death by skin cancer just because once when you were young, when people
didn’t know what laser could cause were having it to remove their hair. Trade a few insignificant hair for cancer.
My dermatologist asked a laser manufacturer: can it cause cancer? and the manufacturer replied: who cares? smoking causes cancer too and yet people still smoke.
Regarding your last statement . . . Bull_____. Name the dermatologist. Until I can confirm it, I don’t believe your statement. I know almost all the major players in the laser manufacturing world and none of them would have said what you imply they said.
I’m a physician and I will categorically state without a qualm that lasers used for laser hair removal can not cause skin cancer. It is all about physics, epidemiology, and the mechanism of skin cancer. And by the way, the ruby laser has been used for almost 30 years in dermatology without any evidence what so ever that it can cause cancer.
Simply put the wavelengths that cause cancer are the wavelengths below 400 nanometers (ultraviolet). These are wavelengths that are short enough to knock a base pair off of a DNA molecule and not be properly repaired by reverse transcriptase which eventually leads to cancerous changes. 400 nanometers is where blue light starts. The alexandrite is in the red spectrum at 755 nanometers and the diode and YAG are even higher up the spectrum. Those wavelengths are too long to effect DNA.
Furthermore, your skin is constantly hit by photons all day long. The difference is that a laser pulse concentrates all the photons into a pulse of light that lasts thousandths of a second. But during the day you get more photons than you get in a treatment (at a particular dermal site). Now multiply that times 365 days a year and how many years you are alive, and you will see that the amount of light energy hitting your skin in that laser pulse is an incredibly small fraction of the total amount of photons that will hit your skin in your lifetime. All the laser has done is to concentrate a period of light energy into a short pulse like a magnifying glass can concentrate the energy of the sun into a small point.
Can it burn the skin? Absolutely. Can it cause permanent damage? In rare cases. Which by the way is far more rare than the permanent damage caused by ingrown hairs and plucking.
But cancer. NO.
And by the way, one of the concerns has been that these lasers could cause precancerous lesions to become cancerous, so a well known dermatlogist (Goldberg) did a study where they purposely lasered these lesions with high energy and then did biopsies looking for chemical precursors that show that cancerous changes are taking place. It is too complicated to use these biochemical markers to screen for skin cancer but they are excellent for academic studies since it takes so long for cancer to develop while these biochemical markers occur much faster. Anyway, they couldn’t find any biochemical changes to show that any damage consistent with precancerous changes had occurred. This was presented at the ASLMS in 2006.
Most of what you are talking about in your posts is just mindless fear, uncertainty, and doubt. And I have to wonder what is your motivation for spreading it.