[color:#000099]Working with a Mirror
Hi All,
Just wanted to chime in on my experience with using a mirror’s reflection. This has always been a big thing in my mind that I have wanted to undertake. I remember reading posts by a very good electrologist that used to post here by the name of Aliciadarling. She was a pro, but also did DIY and commented on her experiences. She was doing face, and had mentioned that the toughest challenge was getting the angle off the skin (theta angle? z-axis?) correct. She said that getting the insertion wasn’t the hard part, it was coming in at the correct angle. Well, I agree now. It would be nice if she came back and gave us another summary. Anyway,
Area: So I was working on upper chest. About three inches above the pectoral line. This is a region where I go with either plain eye vision or 1x or 2x reading glasses. The 3x’s just don’t seem to work well here, or actually, anywhere. So anyway. My goal was to do cleanup work on fairly sparse hair. Sparse in the sense it’s about a 50% reduction from natural male upper chest.
Setup: I made an apparatus to hold the mirror as follows: I got a musician’s boom microphone stand, I took off the mic holder, I got one of those automobile dashboard accessory bendable things that allow you to attach one end with a suction-cup to the windshield, and the other end hold your cell phone. They have about 8 inches of sturdy bendable flex cord. I put a 7-inch diameter mirror on the suction end of that, and the other end attached to the boom mic stand.
View angle: I learned that I needed to keep the mirror directly in front of me, so there was no downward or upward angle of view. When the mirror is right in front of you, with no angles, it takes one more obstacle out of the process, so your brain can more easily grasp what you’re trying to do.
Handpiece / grips: After that, I learned that the longer handpiece worked better than the short handpiece for this. Why? Because you have to go through more variety of gripping/holding styles and left-right handswitching than you would normally. The long handpiece allows you to hold it like a piece of blackboard chalk, a pencil, a downward knife style, and a inwards towards the wrist style. I found myself changing up, and changing hands constantly. It went like this:
Technique: At first it went very, very slow. I only got the downward growing hairs, then I got sideways growing hairs, when I went back to downwards growing hairs, they seemed easier than before. So, as the session progressed, I found that by, and this is important, focusing solely at what I saw in the mirror, and keeping my eyes solely fixed on the mirror, and nothing else, it got easier and easier. When I would glance down at my own hand, it messed me up. I learned only to watch the needle tip in the mirror. Your hand will take care of itselft on autopilot the more you adjust. It’s kind of like working without a mirror, I don’t look at my hand, no, I look at the follicle, the hand takes care of itself.
Extraction quality factors: So anyway, as I switched from left to right, and holding styles to clear this area, my work, of course was not as usual. I would say it took me back to my first half-year’s experience level. I mean, I am more overall more knowledgeable now of course, but in terms of kill/clean extraction rate and speed, it was about like my first six months with Flash. About 70% to 80% were coming out with clean sheathes and bulbs. I found myself hesitant to do my high hit too shallow, because I really don’t want unneccessary eschars/temporary surface marks in this area. I wear a lot of tanktops. And as a result, a weak high hit will allow the sheath to stay in the follicle. So, I have to work on that because it resulted in some extractions not appearing so optimal. The difficulty is more with the growing angle. Hairs growing upwards high on the chest/collarbone growing towards the chin were more difficult, hairs growing towards the ground were easy.
Needle bending concerns: At first my needle bending concerns were on “the approach”, but that became easier, the needle was stressed more on the exit. Instincts to quickly remove the needle from the follicle kind of kicked in as time went by, and I found myself pulling the needle out at wrong angles, ‘bending’, or at least torquing’ on the needle. This was an instinct that was hard to suppress.
Mental focus: Also, I found all the angles were fairly easy to compensate for, the most difficult was, once the insertion was made, the act of pulling in or out laterally, the needle (into or away from the plane of the skin), so I had to be purely visual with this. Watch the dimpling or tenting of the skin and correct it. This gets kind of hard to do, because you have to think about hand movement in reverse, and once I become conscious, it messed me up. It’s kind of like when you go down stairs, once you start thinking about your foot placement, it can interfere.
Tips: So,
Keep the mirror perfectly horizontal to minimize interfering angles.
Use the long handpiece
Keep solely focused on the mirror, and nothing else.
Be prepared to use a variety of holding styles and switch from left to right.
Also keep your light source directly above. Blocking my own light was an issue.
Summary: I can only say, on this area, with my experience, with my setup, this was possible and relatively not a problem. It is not optimal, you’ll get more prominent eschars most likely because the inserts aren’t as clean. Be delicate with the insertions and very mindful before hitting the footswitch, watch the dimpling levels, finding the botton of the follicle is not a problem. I wouldn’t try to dig out ingrowns with a lancet with loupes in a mirror, too much damage. After while I was doing pretty good, it was easier to get the insertion than to extract the hair with forceps afterwards. I found the insertions happening quickly when I just stared at the follicle and let the hand do it’s own guiding. And after I returned to normal working style on a different bodypart, I found myself blazing with auto-insert, because ‘normal’ seemed so much easier.
Hope this helps someone sometime like Aliciadarling’s posts helped me.[/color]