Laser hair removal and hair supplements

I recently went to an Ideal Image to set up treatments for laser hair removal for my face and neck (which I will start to get next week). I have fair skin and dark course hairs on my neck, and softer dark hairs on my sideburn area, upper lip and across my cheeks.

Last week they did test spots on my neck so that I could see how it felt, it did not hurt at all, I just felt the cooling sensation. My neck was a little red for about 10 minutes, and that was all.

The dark and longest hairs on my neck are completely gone, (I could smell the hair burning or maybe it was my skin?) now I just have some other dark hairs that seem to be stuck and they are “springy” looking but I haven’t pulled at them, I’m not going to mess with them for now.

My question is about things like vitamins interfering with hair growth. I wanted to start taking Biotin to help with my hair and nails. I wonder if this is going to cause anymore hair to pop out and should I avoid taking anything like that? The last thing I want is to get hair removal and then have more that wouldn’t have been there normally. I am wondering if there are any resources online that talk about this kind of thing, I have been trying to find some and would appreciate any help.

please read the FAQs asap: www.hairremovalforum.com/faq.cfm

a few points on your post:

  1. I would avoid treating any fine hairs you describe on your cheeks, upper lip, etc. You can potentially experienced INCREASED growth on these areas because the hair is not coarse enough. It would be wiser to treat that hair with electrolysis (I prefer electrolysis for most female facial hair because it’s hard to treat as most women don’t have coarse enough growth there and end up stimulating finer and dormant follicles to grow in darker). Just use the search feature and read others’ experiences here.

  2. Ideal Image seems to use low settings which is also witnessed by your testimony that you didn’t feel much. That usually means you’re undertreated, which might burn the hair, but won’t be enough to kill it (i.e. it will come back and could potentially come back worse with low settings as well)

  3. I would research a few more clinics if I were you. It seems this place is very upscale from others’ experiences, and they charge two or more times the average price for that luxury. Plus, they tend to use low settings, so unless they are willing to go higher, I would consider other places and compare.

  4. Not sure if that particular drug will intervene with treatments, but there are a lot of various things that affect hair growth but are not documented to do so. If you want to be absolutely sure, I wouldn’t use it while you’re doing this.

  5. It’s too early to tell if there was any permanent effect on that spot. Hair will get singed, but that doesn’t mean that the root was killed.

lagirl - question for you. I am planning to get treatments on my buttocks to eliminate some embarassing hair. However that hair is dark but not too coarse. Do you think then that the treatments could actually make it worse? I definitely don’t want that.

can you take a picture and show even a tiny square of it or can you describe the hair in more detail. it’s really hard to imagine exactly what kind of coarseness and density you’re talking about. generally, no hair stimulation has been experienced on that area. but i would still avoid treating it with laser if you don’t have a lot of hair and it’s not dense and at least somewhat coarse (like women’s leg hair for example, that would be fine; women’s finer arm hair type i would think twice…)