Dear Audrey32:
Be at peace, the reason this site exists is to give people a place to ask their questions and get answers. On some questions, they get many different answers, and perhaps an argument breaks out, but at least one is getting the question viewed from many sides.
What you need to understand in order to comprehend the answer to your question on permanency of electrolysis is that electrolysis is a spot specific treatment that causes the interior of the follicle to heal in such a way that a callous of skin walls off the interior of the follicle, thus closing off access to the follicular blood supply, and also eliminates the germative growth cells that start the hairs. There is literally no way a hair can grow back in that follicle. While sweat and sebum will still flow from that follicle, hair won’t ever grow again.
The reason why women with hormonal imbalances can grow new hairs is that the body has a minimum of 1,000 follicles per square inch, and while the visilbe hairs treated by electrolysis at any one time would tend to be between 5 and 100 hairs per square inch on a woman, this leaves the rest of the 1,000 follicles for the body to recruit to grow hairs in the future if the correct conditions exist to make that happen. This is why a person can either spend a lifetime having short electrolysis appointments on a steady schedule, or have no need for treatments for years, and then have to do a fresh course of treatments decades later.
In the case of an ongoing situation where the body is recruiting new follicles to grow terminal hair in previously non-hair growing follicles, the process of recruitment tends to be only a small number of hairs at a time, say, adding an additional 3 hairs per square inch every 3 months. Now if it takes 3 months to add 3 hairs, it would take over 83 years before every possible hair would have been recruited, shown itself, and been treated with electrolysis. This is why we stress that while we can remove hair permanently, one must address the reason for the hair being there in the first place, as one could spend a lifetime of having 15 minute appointments every 3 - 4 weeks if the cause of the hair growth is not resolved.
That is why we say that hair removal is like playing the carnival game “Whack-A-Mole”. We try to hit the hairs when they come up, but if we miss them, we have to wait until they come out again, on what ever schedule they are working on, and if that hair only comes out for 12 weeks, once a year, that is all the opportunity we are going to get. Furthermore, we don’t know how many hairs are in the grid, nor how many new active slots are being created in the grid as we play.
Do you now see why electrolysis practitioners don’t attempt to answer this question on the phone.
