how long til the swelling goes away....

i just went in for my first appt for electrolysis on saturday. it is now tuesday and my face is still pretty swelled. how long should i expect before the welling goes away?

If it’s just red and swollen in the patches you treated, you might have your practitioner do thinning instead of clearing. Clearing all the hair in a small area can be harder on the skin.

Male facial hair is the most difficult challenge of a hair removal method, so be prepared to commit to a long and unpleasant task. If you seek complete and permanent beard removal, it’s very important to do a lot of research and understand the difficulty of the undertaking. Proper skin care between and after treatments is vital.

heres the deal. i went in for lazer surgery and they left patches. the electrolysis is just thinning out the areas that were untreated by the laser. so she is not clearing just thinning it out. it is red in the areas where the electrolysis treated. is this normal a few days after treatment?

If the laser place left a strip with 50 hairs, thinning would remove a fraction of those on your first visit, maybe a third of them This is easier on the skin than clearing all 50.

Busting down a male beard, especially the first treatment on each hair, is very hard on the skin. It’s not uncommon to have swelling and redness for several days after.

dang, I’m assuming that you’re being treated with thermolysis. This uses heat to affect a localised ‘burn’ and to destroy the hair root.

Heat travels very well through skin tissues, and hangs around for a long time. If you treat one hair, then you can’t help but heat the surrounding tissue too - in a circle say a quarter inch across. If you then go and treat a hair within that surrounding tissue, you’re double heating the same area. With the next hair you tripple heat it, and so on.

Before you know it you’ve heated and re-heated the tissue maybe 10 times over. That’s why you get the swelling and redness. I’ve known swelling last almost 2 whole weeks!

Andrea’s quite right - to avoid swelling, you could ask your practitioner to only zap hairs say a quarter inch apart.
Or ask her to use blend instead. (Blend uses only minimal heat to treat each hair, so surrounding tissue isn’t affected.)

[ September 12, 2002, 01:06 AM: Message edited by: Toni ]

Blend does work better but in most cases presented the client wants the hair gone NOW! so the reason for doing Thermolysis is to clear a bigger area in the amount of time the client wants. Ask your electrologist to adjust the settings. This can be easily done. And your right the work should be scattered and not all in one area as you can get overtreatment. I never like to see scabbing on the face or lots of swelling…You should be able to feel comfortable with the look after treatment within 24 hrs.