This tiny issue does deserve an individual posting, so here goes. I want to know, I REALLY want to know, why people think (only, sometimes, occasionally?) it’s “easier to kill early anagen hairs?” Okay, I’m all ears.
Possibly CYA??
Can you post a picture of your famous ears?
To answer your question, this was probably taught in school and we all come away with that concept. Also, moisture is present at this stage and moisture is a good conductor of electricity. Also, the the follicle is connected to the dermal papilla, the refrigerator of the hair. Okay, on a scale of 1-10, how stupid did I sound?
I give you a solid 1 for not being stupid at all!! This is the prevailing line and from the posters here we seem to hear a lot of them saying during consultations they are told that hairs need multiple treatments to “weaken” them. Perpetuating (hope I spelled that right) the myth. Covers a multitude of sins. Including mine, I suppose…
MaryC
OMG, yes my big stupid ears! I am going to make Dr. Chapple do something this year! (Do ears get bigger? — actually, yes they do! So do noses!) And feet, my God I have total clown feet — edging at size 13.5! My big feet keep disconnecting wires under my accelerator and brake pedals — and I don’t even have a Japanese car!
Okay, I’m just listening at the moment. You know my big ears. Remember, nobody sounds “stupid” just look at all the times I have had to “eat crow.” Actually, it’s not all that bad. About “arguments:” most of the time, I lose arguments with myself if I think about things long enough.
I do, however, like the CYA expression. (I have my own tidy CYA information for clients.)
WHAT ARE YOU DRINKING Michael BoNO??? I want some!! Okay, we need more input about this anagen stuff. Come, oh, come ye electrologists of the world far and wide!
Dee Dee dumb dumb??? or not?
Some weeks ago i posted to that subject as a question, based on an observation with my first beard removal client. After the 1st or 2nd clearance i noticed the next set of hairs coming back almost simultaneously and treated them while they were in really early anagen. It was “fun” - much less energy, progress twice as fast (at that time i did manual blend), correspondingly much reduced reaction of the skin. Initially i was very happy.
Now she needs to interrupt the schedule for 6-8 weeks quite often due to demands of her business, thus i can see the steady state of the last result. Although these fine hairs “epilated perfectly” the steady state after that session was as if there had been nothing done at all (in terms of time needed to clear that area).
Frustrating for both of us. As soon as i let the beasts grow thick, i obtained real results.
Which rises one question: when is an anagen hair ripe to be “harvested”? How can i judge from a fine tip coming through the skin?
Beate
@Beate_r
Just curious: did you have laser treatments on the area prior to electrolysis?
The whole anagen thing is rooted (no pun intended) in observation. It was also observed in animal studies using ruby lasers (already commented on this in another thread).
Keep in mind that the our knowledge of the physiology of hair cycles and exact mechanisms of permanent hair removal is incomplete.
I had, but that is not so important.
The client has had 5 sessions, and almost everything came back white (of deep black hair).
For laser, anagen only makes sense. My observation is entirely different from said “observations” re: electrolysis.
edit: I meant the client not you
Mainly because the roots of telogen hair are often much lighter colored that those of telogen hairs, won’t it?
Otherwise the mechanisms of destruction of the follicle are too similar between light induced thermolysis and flash electrolysis.
The word might be “easier”. It doesn’t mean that the hair growing cells can’t be killed when the hair is in other stages, but that it’s easier in early anagen…
As I understand early anagen, the papilla will migrate from shallow to it’s greatest depth as the hair grows. The reasons for believing it’s easier might be that the follicle could be a little straighter for a good insertion; the germinative cells (hope that’s not a BS word) could be compacted in lesser space allowing current to do its job; and the early anagen hair will have a nice juicy root sheath to allow good current action. That’s what my logic tells me.
Regarding some of the other “consultation facts” that are given out: My first instructor used the “piece-meal” destruction “fact” and the “multiple papilla” “fact” to explain the length of time it took to complete treatments. I believe in the “piece-meal” action - but that should be improved upon with practice. The “multiple papilla” is not a fact for all hair follicles, IMHO.
I am curious if there is a term for those little hair pods we see on the body. You know the ones…where you might see 3 or 4 hairs at the beginning of a treatment and as treatments progress you see one hair. On websites that do hair transplants, I notice they use “follicle unit (FU)” or something like that - is that just the term they use for the hairs they are harvesting for transplant? (Michael?)
If the area has been shaved or hair cut with scissors for about 3 months ago, the majority of hairs are in late anagen, catagen or telogen. The man’s beard, for example (always shaved), has the most hair in late anagen phase, very few in telogen, and very few in early anagen.
Instead the man’s arms are the most hairs in telogen and very few in late anagen. The percentage of hairs in early anagen is much smaller than the percentage of hairs in telogen.
You can only work in early anagen if the customer has previously used wax or tweezers few days before the start of Electrolysis, then, to work in this phase, the sessions should be weekly or biweekly.
When I get up enough “steam” I’ll write something more in depth about this issue — I mostly wanted to hear your ideas and learn. But yes Barbara I did about 25 - 30 hair transplant surgeries with Dr. Perkins (Santa Barbara). He harvested the skin; I cut the tiny grafts and placed them (with the doc) in the tiny slits he made. I can’t tell you how many times the process would come to a dead stop when I’d see a “real life” catagen hair, or an early anagen just getting ready to break the skin’s surface. I would “dance around the OR” and insist everybody look at this amazing find. The doc and nurse would just laugh — luckily the patient was “sleeping.”
It’s a real shame that all of us cannot hold the “fabulous follicle” in our hands and look at them under magnification. It changes everything! Telogen hairs really are odd looking: no root and they look like a stalk of hay. We were certain to also use the telogen hairs, because, well, they grew in beautifully!
The other amazing thing, to me, is how gigantic the sebaceous glands are. ALL the drawings of the follicle and sebaceous glands are seriously wrong. Amazing how tough the dermis is, how thin the epidermis is (you can’t see it) and how “flimsy” the fat layer is — it’s like butter. I think artists just re-draw what they see in a book and eventually we get this silly stylized image of the hair unit.
(I shouldn’t admit this, but I took a few hair follicles home with me for some experiments. I wanted to see what inserting a needle into the things really looks like. I think all the schools should try to get scalp tissue so they can show students what they are dealing with. Even after all these years, I have not lost my wonderment and enthusiasm for our profession.
Or during maintenance short time after full clearance of the area, as i did.
The time the follicle needs to reach full anagen depth apparently does also vary.
Let me concentrate on facial hair, where i do most of my work (and where i feel the need to optimise the efficiency of my treatment): I saw hair just having broken through the skin with at least almost fully developed root and i saw hair which developed tiny and shallow and needed (at least?) several weeks to approach its anagen depth, the latter typically in male beards.
Michael, for me to work in early anagen is not easier. Quite the contrary. I will go further, as far as possible I try to avoid always work in this phase. The main reason is to minimize the destruction of a segment of the follicle that is irrelevant for hair removal (transitory part).
I have no reliable data showing that working in early anagen, we have more regrowth (since I do not know how to make an objective count of the hairs on the early growth phase), but I swear it is.
That said, I will try to give my personal opinion of why many say it is easier to work in early anagen. Whatever the main reason given by Dee (more moisture in the follicle).
When the current has partially damaged a follicle, return to treat this same follicle during the process of healing is much easier because the anchorage zone is more vulnerable and blood involved in this process contains much water, too.
When I wrote my first book, I talked about the “anchor” of the follicle. i.e., the hair is not held in at the bottom of the follicle, but at the upper portion. This is counterintuitive if you look at a follicle (drawing) because the thing looks like an onion, and you assume it’s attached at the bulb. (There is a point to where I’m going here — stick with it for a moment.)
My assumption was confirmed by direct observation, albeit from a surgical “error.” Early on, surgeons cut the hair transplant graft using an array of blades held with spacers to give you tiny strips of a few millimeters in width. The problem is that often the strips at the sides were cut in half: there would be the upper portion of the follicles in one strip, and the lower portion in another. (Nobody uses these “slicers” any more. Now they take out a wide strip and allow technicians to “slice and dice.”)
(As a side note, the recommendation was to implant both halves: upper and lower. The literature says that both sections will result in regrowing hairs — although to a somewhat lesser result.)
The point is, I got to play with these “mistakes.” My findings: the strips holding only the lower follicle would allow me to tweeze out the hair with little resistance. The grafts with only the upper follicle put up a big resistance. Indeed, the “anchor” is in the upper follicle! There is no doubt about this.
Further, as the maturing hairs become more keratinized (getting into telogen) the anchor gets stronger and stronger — but it’s not “dehydrated!” Some assert that the currents will not work in telogen because there is no moisture. I think this idea is rubbish. Yes, the telogenic “anchor” is harder, but not like your fingernails; it’s more like the stratum cornium. Besides the “target area” lies below the anchor — all nice and wet. The telogen hair only offers more epilation resistance. (I think it’s this resistance that makes us think telogen hairs — follicles — are harder to destroy.)
I agree with Jossie, that sometimes working only in early anagen can give you a false sense of accomplishment. One of my favorite patients was Merrill R., she’s an OR nurse at our hospital specializing in eye surgery. She spent thousands on laser and it did not work for her — on her legs (white skin, black hairs … sorry laser folks!). Anyway, all the hairs I worked on, initially, were early anagen. (After laser failed, she went back to waxing.) The hairs epilated with no resistance. I “went with” the easy epilation, and got WAY too much regrowth! I mean, I seriously failed to deliver a good treatment. Then, I discovered that hairs would slide out of her leg follicles without even adding current — just a tweeze. The hairs seemed to “fall out.” At that point I had to carefully stick to my “units of lye” chart to be sure I was doing permanent removal. In this case, the early anagens were giving me a “false positive.” I was “flying blind,” could not use “ease of epilation” as my guide and had to rely only on my computations for the 60-unit hairs.
(I’ll end this now. I just never seem to be able to write short posts — sorry!!!)
Oh to answer your question.
Yes, they use the term “follicle unit.” The hairs are always grouped in little bunches and the surgeons try to emulate this. (When you see a unit, you cut out the whole thing — 3 hairs or so.) Although the big deal now is very tiny “single hair” grafts. What they found is that putting in a tiny bunch of follicles (I mean the actual FU itself) can also end up looking unnatural! As the skin heals, the follicle units are pulled in together and the result can look like an unnatural dense cluster. (It must be those pesky myofibroblasts pulling the skin together? — Well, that’s what they do.)
However, we found that, in time, the cluster gets looser (the skin relaxes). Also the surgery causes all the hairs to go into anagen (when they regrow) and this also looks unnatural — “pluggy” or like a doll’s hair (all dark in color too). After a year or so, the hair follicles in the “unit” go back to their normal shedding cycle and look much better: looser, lesser in number and different colors. (I’m sure every electrologist could predict this: how “damage-stimulation” induces anagen. Actually, I got to explain this to the surgeon! He loved it!)
The really top guys implant the hair graft with the entire upper (epidermis) sticking out of the hole! The upper exposed skin desiccates and dies. Doing this, there is no “pebbling” (if the epidermis is implanted too deeply), and the epidermis grows back completely flush — with no bump or “dents.” (This is one secret to the really excellent jobs). I learned this from Dr. Kurgis when I sat-in to observe his surgery — he’s the best in our area. Frankly, I send my patients to Kurgis! But don’t tell my secret!)