After reading up about it on the pages around here, I recently purchased the OneTouch DIY electrology kit. I did a little poking around with it with the power off, to make sure I could get it into the follicles without burning myself. Unfortunatly, after an hour of trying on multiple types of hair, I couldn’t get it in anywhere. At 10x magnification, it looked as though the follicles were all too thin to fit both the hair and the needle at the same time. I tried tugging the hair around with tweezers to see if I could open it up some more, but that didn’t do anything noticable. I also tried just pulling the hair out completly, but then I couldn’t find the follicle at all. Am I doing something wrong? Do I just need better magnification? Would using a lotion to open the pores work, or would that interfere with the current? Thanks!
Your problem is that you are using the One Touch. The One Touch probe/needle is too large to make easy insertions. Professional units have probe sizes from 1 to 6 and they are all smaller than the one touch “stylus.” Also, One Touch charges outrageous prices for replacements that could bet you cards of pro probes/needles for the price of one stylus.
Although the probe on the One Touch is pretty large, the nice thing about skin is that it’s pliable. The important things about insertions are:
-
Make sure you get the probe started right at the opening of the follicle. You can be off by half a millimeter and miss, so it sometimes takes a few light prods before your tip finds the opening.
-
Make sure that you angle the probe in the same direction as the follicle. On some, the hairs will be quite straight and give a good indication of what’s happening below the skin. On curlier hairs, you have to play a game with the hair to see if the follicle is at some other angle than what seems obvious. So you sometimes have to try different angles to eventually find that elusive feel where the probe just slides in almost by itself.
I often try to make the hair and the probe visually become like one to help find the opening and the angle. Some hairs basically have the root just below the skin’s surface and for these, there’s basically not much of the second item. Examine every hair that you extract and learn from it: depth, angle, growth stage, and potential that it was killed.
Very good lighting and magnification can help with the first item, but it takes practice to get the second one working well.
I was surprised at the various sizes of hairs I could actually treat with the One Touch. However, for very fine hairs it’s pretty impossible.
The probes also tend to bend very easily and the stylus often gets in the way of seeing what you’re doing as the probe slides up a shaft and out of sight and you sometimes can’t tell if the probe is going in a follicle or just retracting up the stylus. If the tip is removed from the stylus, one can see more clearly what’s going on.
At $5.95 for 2, the One Touch probes are expensive, large, and fragile. Professional probes can be purchased for about $20 for 50, are available in smaller sizes, and are sturdier to boot; much easier to work with. See http://www.geocities.com/hairfreethere/ for some more info.
Can you use pro probes with the Onetouch?
Basically no. The attachment method is quite different from any pro type probe. However the One Touch is a pretty simple device, basically a battery, an adjustable resistor and a probe. So it would not be hard to make your own using a professional probe and you’d be all set. See http://www.geocities.com/hairfreethere/ for more details on this.