Gentronics MC160D-C experience

Hair Removal Methods Professional Electrolysis
#1

I’ve had some work done on me for trans beard removal with the Gentronics digital multineedle. It’s been about half a year, and my skin still looks beat to heck. Pitting on the lip, a bumpy texture and a speckled hypopigmented coloration along the jaw and chin. My operator had the settings – with some adjustments – to be approximately 0.130 mA for 5 min. This is about 400 units-of-lye.

I’ve heard anecdotally that the numbers for the Gentronics digital are a bit funny, that the current on the display is the aggregate current flowing through all 16 probes when all are on. This seems like a weird choice for the display. The person who told me this said that he read it somewhere, but he hasn’t used the machine in years, and never professionally. Does anyone want to share their experience with this epilator?

#2

I owned this epilator for a couple years and found it to be just fine! It takes skill and knowledge to remove hair, no matter what device one is using.

The numbers on the Gentronic digital means nothing. Working on a beard requires the same principles of finding the correct amount of intensity, along with the correct amount of timing, so as to not over treat or under treat the individual follicles. Start low and work it up until the hair releases.

Before pictures are very important. Very few people start out with porcelain skin. We all have some degree of orange peel skin and many times the temporary hair removal methods we have used in the past can leave marks and hyperpigmentation. I don’t doubt what you are saying about your skin reaction, but wanted you to know that some of that may just be the pre-electrolysis skin appearance that you didn’t notice because the hair was attracting your eye.

Four hundred units of lye sounds like overkill . We don’t need to treat the follicle beyond what is necessary.

I am not against multi-needle galvanic. It is a very effective killing option and the Gentronics is a wonderful device to use. Personally, I gave up my unit years ago, in favor of a faster and just as effective modality.

Please use what you think is best for you.

Don’t blame it on the Gentronic digital. The human being working on you needs skill and experience to do multi-needle galvanic. I liked the feature of the Gentronics MNG where the wires are on individual circuits so they can be timed to go off one by one.

1 Like
#3

Hi Dee,

Thank you for your response.

This isn’t a personal attack, but I’m a little skeptical of the claim that the numbers on the Gentronics mean nothing. I understand that there are many variables that come into play, such as skin moisture and hair thickness, but the numbers have physical units (microamps and seconds) that correspond to a physical reality. When I first started receiving treatments, I didn’t know much about electrology. I still don’t. I’m reading Hinkel’s book and seeing the units-of-lye chart that maxes out at 80 UL. I know that this isn’t an exact science and there’s some wiggle room here – Hinkel says as much – but 400 UL seems ridiculous.

It’d be like if someone were telling you to roast a turkey in the oven at 350 F for 24 hrs. Yes, there are variables – weight, amount of stuffing, rack placement, etc – but there is also a point where you have to say to yourself, “Wait, what’s going on? Did I miss something?” I’m not blaming the machine or the operator. I’m just confused about what’s actually happening, and am looking for other people with experience with this machine. Really just an acknowledgement like “Oh yeah, I can envision a scenario where those numbers would make sense”, “I can’t conceive of ever pushing my machine that high”, or “The numbers are funny on my machine, too.”

I’ve considered that a lot of what I’m seeing may have occurred pre-electrolysis. I naturally have orange-peel skin; that doesn’t bother me. It just seems strange that the hypopigmentation (i.e., whitening) I’m seeing lines up exactly with the contours of my old beard. We also did half of the upper lip, and the pitting I see is on the treated half. I’ve never tweezed or waxed, just shaved, so I don’t think I would have any scarring from prior epilation. Other electrologists and dermatologists have looked at my face and commented on all the weirdness (That’s a lot of white dots! At least they’re flat! Would you rather have the dots or your hair?) so I’ve already come to terms with the fact that something is not right. At this point, I’m less concerned about my skin per se than trying to figure out what happened.

#4

I am frequently asked what energy levels I would use for trans beard hair, as a for instance. The numbers I use are irrelevant whether it be on a Gentronics, Sil-Tone, Apilus, or Instatron. Whatever epilator one uses, you must start low and then gradually increase until the hair slides out and the skin looks like nothing happened. To complicate things, I may use a level of 700 els over 85% on one beard and 1800 over 92% on another. I don’t recall the levels on the Gentronics being quirky. They are what they are and you just have to find the right combination of intensity and timing (energy level) in order to budge the hair, while watching the skin. That principle works for any professional epilator. They are all calibrated differently.

#5

Hi Dee,

I agree! The machines are calibrated differently! That’s why I’m asking for experiences of people who have used the Gentronics multineedle, to see if values like 400 UL make sense in this context. I do recall that the machine does the multiplication for you. You can read the amperage, the time, and the UL values off the display.

I’ve worked with a few thermolysis epilators, although not in a professional capacity. I’m just a student. I agree that the EL settings on say a Silhouet-Tone have no relation to the EL settings on an Apilus. This makes sense to me: “EL” is not a standardized unit. On the other hand, UL is standardized. A UL is 0.1 mA-sec, which is 100 μC. That’s a set number of electrons, on the order of 10^14, which will go on to produce, at most, an equivalent number of OH- ions. At this point, the fuzziness of chemical efficiency and human anatomy come into play, but before this, it’s all engineering. It would be weird for an electrical engineer to redefine a UL given that it’s a glorified coulomb or mole, but I’m not saying it’s impossible, just weird.

Again, I’ve heard it said (but with no verification) that the current reading on the multineedle setting splits the current among the probes, so your amperage is really 1/16 of what you would initially think. That isn’t how I would design the machine, but it’s a defensible decision. I’m just trying to see if other people’s settings line up with this theory.

#6

Hi Samarkand.

If you are curious about settings, on a male beard, I generally find that around 150 micro amperes @ 3 minutes is sufficient on my Gentronics MC 150. Its a good idea to use the delay feature so current begins a few seconds after insertion - so that the activity does not begin while attempting to make a proper insertion. Each lead works independently of each other. How did your skin look during the healing process? Some people do have an allergic reaction to the sodium hydroxide. To date though, I have not yet seen this allergic reaction and to date, I have not observed any pitting as a result of MPG but anything is possible.

#7

My understanding from the person that designed and made the epilator is that each wire has its own circuit. That would mean that its not putting out 1/16 amperage and is timed to turn off (green light goes off) after several minutes. Energy Levels equals whatever intensity and time is required to budge the hair, without any tugging. Jim Jensen did tell me that if there is some tugging, that’s okay because the follicle has been filled with lye and will continue to work for awhile to destroy hair germ cells. I always worked for a smooth release though.

1 Like
#8

Hi Arlene,

My electrologist does use the delay feature. I watch the little LEDs pop on a few seconds after insertion.

During treatment, my skin gets red, although this fades by the time I arrive home an hour later or so. There’s also some swelling which can last for a day or two. This is only noticeable when the face has been worked on asymmetrically, so that the shape of my face becomes lopsided, or when my upper lip was worked on. Scabs appear within a few days and disappear like clockwork on day 6. Skin usually looks fine on day 7.

Here’s a rather blurry image of the amount of redness I see. The white stuff is topical BLT anaesthetic. My electrologist has me slather my face with it.

https://imgur.com/dclGguA

Scabbing about three days after would look like this.

https://imgur.com/Teh6l73

Severe upper lip swelling after removing about 900 hairs:

https://imgur.com/MiNs81r

That lip a month after treatment:

https://imgur.com/cxWekeo

That lip today, 6 months after treatment. I started seeing another electrologist who is doing excellent work on my upper lip, which is why the hair is sparser, but the caved-in bits at the corner predate the new electrologist’s work. I have big pores in general, which I don’t mind. Some of them started to join up in lines and sink in at the corners of my mouth. (I’m aware of this because I used to be able to get a smooth finish with beard cover and foundation. I can’t any more.) These lines have recently started to resolve back into individual pores, although they are still present.

https://imgur.com/i1phhOg

There’s some hyperpigmentation not apparent in the photo, but I know that that will fade. I can’t capture the hypopigmentation on the chin until I find the charger for the nice camera.

#9

That looks like orange peel effect to me not pitting an is likely to resolve itself over time… The scabbing aand redness look spot on for a galvanic treatment, almost exactly as they should be,

#10

Even in the areas you do not have treatment, it looks like you have large pores. That’s fine; you’ll just be expressing more sebum and wrinkle slower. It looks like the hyperpigmentation faded and healing looks good from what I can tell as the image is not as clear as I would like it to be. I hope you are happier with treatment and results these days.

#11

Hi Seana,

Yeah, I never was concerned about the scabbing and redness. I’ve been aware that that’s common (even expected) for galvanic treatments. When people talk about orange peel skin on here and post pictures of large pores, I usually just think that that’s how my skin looks naturally. The thickness and oiliness have done a lot to prevent wrinkling from ageing (as Arlene goes on to mention).

This is about as good an image of my lip as I can take one-handed with my camera. Again, there’s some line-iness that wasn’t there before, and while I recognize that my cheeks have a similar look, the other corner of the mouth (where my former electrologist didn’t work so hard) does not.

kQqaPnE.jpg5184×3456 1.97 MB

I would like some opinions about what these whitish things are, which appear along my chin and jaw, and get a little fainter as we move up into the sideburn area. No evidence of any where there was no hair.

EDeACis.jpg5184×3456 2.16 MB

#12

The hairs in the corner of your mouth can be real “bitches” to budge, even if they are smaller hairs. That area is packed tightly with epithelial cells because there is a lot of movement with eating and talking, so perhaps that is why many struggle to get smooth releases there. I think that one small area was over treated, but give it time to repair over the next 12-18 months. At least the hair is probably gone…

#13

Hi Deedra,

Thanks. Yeah, I’m aware there isn’t much I can do aside from wait. I’m just dismayed that I have this weirdness seven months after treatment. My current electrologist says she’s seen some pretty gnarly reactions from beard removal – way worse than what I’m stressing out about – even out over the course of a few years, but in some cases seven or eight.

When I mentioned the white spots to my current electrologist in a phone consultation, she mentioned that she’s seen pinpoint white scars on trans women who got too aggressive with their galvanic OneTouch self-treatment. Now, she’s not convinced that they are in fact scarring, and she does a good job at putting me in a “Don’t Panic” state of mind when I visit her. It still worries me that this notion that galvanic simply can’t scar because no heat is involved is floating around on the Internet.

#14

samar in the second picture about middle of the picture onthe far right hand side there appears to be a skinabnomality of some kind. Can you tell me what that is or give a better picture of it? It’s hard to tell from the blurriness just there and the angle, but it doesnt look good at all.

#15

Yep. That showed up in late August. After treatment along the side of the neck, an ingrown or something embedded in the skin resulted in a big inflamed cyst which took a few weeks to heal. I’ve never had anything like it before. It left a big white scar, maybe a centimeter long. I don’t mind that one, because it’s not on my face, but people have been asking me about it over the past few months.

I will say that a criticism that my current electro gave of the previous work is that she left a lot of stuff in the skin. Roots, sheaths, gunk. Some of the “pits” I’m dealing with have bluish-gray at the bottom. We need to open them up at some point and clean them out. I worry those smaller white dots are scarring around embedded material.

#16

IMG_20181127_032416
IMG_20181127_032416.jpg4032×3024 2.97 MB
For the sake of completeness.

#17

Finally, a good picture of these things.

IMG_20181127_034113
IMG_20181127_034113.jpg3024×4032 2.73 MB

#18

I don’t see hypopigmentation (white spots) on my trans women beards, even when we are finished, with 80-150 hours of treatment. I’m not sure the white spots will go away? The notion that galvanic cannot scar is false. Any method can scar if it’s not used properly. We constantly strive for deep insertions, according to the follicle depth, perfect insertions and the proper use of timing and intensity, which simply means, the proper energy level. We do not need to treat the follicle beyond what is necessary. Doing so can cause scarring and hypopigmentation, that may or may not go away.

#19

I’ve never seen this from any of my blend treatments. I still hold blend as the safest overall for any kind of DIY. Agreed galvanic done poorly can have just as bad results as any other modality including some scarring. This notion that galvanic is somehow not able to scar is total nosense, but as I dont have a lot of experience with galvanic scarring I cant really say much about what I’m seeing here.
“space junk” or debris in the follicle, happen all the time in electrolysis . In most cases it is not "trapped " under the skin . The bits o root sheath or debris that are left behind slowly work their way out of the skin most of the time. Ingrowns, are another matter and that may be what we are seeing on the neck. Blend with it’s liquid heared lye, is the best modality to address highly distorted fillicles and ingrown hairs. I can take a few educated stabs at where I THINK the hair root and dermal papillae are in thermolysis, and often get it exactly right. But it’s still a guessing game and extracting such ingrowns can be a messy affair that WILL leave a scar or two.
Since you mention you are transgender, I will say that skin quality improves and things like deeply ingrown hairs, happen less and less frequently the longer you are on HRT, as the testosterone reduces with an antiandrogen this is the case. It can take some time to get there so you need to be consistent with your medication, but there is hope for your skin to tighten up its pores.
I treat a full schedule of approximately 50 % transgender clientele 5 days a week. I’m also a transperson myself and I can tell you similar large pores on myself, resolved completely.

#20

Thank you.

I just wanted some documentation somewhere online that this is an issue with galvanic treatment, since the pictures and discussion I can find of adverse reactions are all from thermo and blend.

I’m upset that I paid money (actually I believe she’s the most expensive electro in my area) for this sort of result. She is also a 20 year electro veteran and teaches at the nearby school. I don’t really know what to do now. My current electro is excellent, but there’s only so much she can do at this stage.