Concerned about sanitation

Hey everyone,

Today was my 2nd electrolysis session. The practicioner I am seeing is very communicative and passionate about her work. She has 16 years of experience and rather seems to know what she’s doing.

The only problem I have is about the sanitation of the place. I’d asked her in my first session if she uses new needles and if she cleans the tweezers. Indeed, she showed me the new needles and clean tweezers in the packages at the time. But now she moved places and things seem to be a bit more chaotic (they weren’t perfect to begin with).

She’s alone in the new place with no help at all. Today she was attending a client before me (doing laser) and then she ran around the place to see him out and see me in, etc. The only thing I saw her doing was replacing the paper on the table. I didn’t see her washing her hands and the tweezers were lying directly on top of a counter. She did wear white gloves and she put the used tweezers on an open container with other perused material.

The thing is, for all our open relation, wouldn’t it be rude of me to ask her to wash her hands? How do I even begin that conversation? ‘Excuse me, but it bothers me to not see you clean up before our session’ - does that sound good enough? As a professional, would you feel offended if a client brought this kind of thing to attention?

Also, what kind of risks am I taking here, with this level of sanitation? I would try other places but electrolysis is unheard of here in Portugal and there is not association of electrologysts here so there are no guidelines, per say, in the few places where the service is available. Besides, not withstanding, I am happy with her work. It just happens there is this massive concern that needs to be addressed and I plan to do so in my next session. I am just unsure how =/

I am going to take the unpopular stand here and say this, unless you have a compromised immune system, RELAX. If you read the sanitation regulations for restaurants and compared them to you, or your mother’s kitchen, one would think that you should have died from dozens of diseases long ago.

While I am not going to say that sanitation is unimportant, I am going to say that the protocols are overly redundant, and therefore missing one or two things on the recommended list is not critical. If she is wearing gloves, washing hands in between is not as critical as you might think. If on the other hand, she were working bare handed (no problem with that) then I would find my voice and request she wash in between.

While the forceps/tweezers should of course be sanitized in between uses, if one is not using them to dig out ingrown hairs, they really should only be touching the hairs, not your skin while in use.

Now, I return you to the regularly scheduled group who will tell you to run out of there screaming bloody murder, until you find someone who is doing 24 things to be sanitary, when 3 to 6 on the list would have been just fine.

If anything, I think my immune system works too well (auto-immune thyroid disease here). It must be just as paranoid as me lol.

Hm, no, she doesn’t work on any ingrown hairs (I don’t have many, thankfully).

Thanks for your input!