Back to the forums after a five year hiatus! Good to see you folks are still doing good work helping people understand hair removal.
Anyway, I am back, this time with a question: How easily should the hair release post epilation?
I did quite a bit of work using a Uniprobe Autoblend. It certainly seemed to be a decent machine, and using local anesthetic I was able to get treatment times down to a couple of seconds a hair. The hairs slid out easily, and that was often my barometer for effective treatment. I achieved excellent long-term results: About three passes on a given area, and it was hair free forever. I did the entire pelvic area, armpits, upper lip and eyebrows, so I have a fair amount of experience.
Now I am using an Apilus Senior II (thanks, Ebay: $1K!) and I have found that the machine seems to be a lot less aggressive than the Autoblend. I am having to subject the patient to multiple treatments on a given follicle to get release. I have tried the various blend programs, the Microflash, and so on. The results seem to be consistently mild. The patient uses no anesthetic and reports the sensation to be pretty mild, certainly much less than I recall from the Autoblend epilation.
All self diagnostics on the Apilus check out. I used Ballet insulated F3 and Pro-Tec insulated #3 needles. I am pretty comfortable with the insertions, having quite a bit of experience previously. I tweezed a hair and found the follicle base to be about 3-4 mm below the surface, and that is where I set the insertion depth.
Do you all have any suggestions? Was I over-treating previously? Should the treatment be aggressive enough to make the hairs slide out easily? Is it likely there is something wrong with the machine? I can’t believe that as the Senior II is a tank and everything seems to function correctly. I’m stumped and would appreciate any insight.
Eric