Can’t seem to find before and after photos of what successful laser hair thinning on legs or chest should look like. Does anyone have such photos?
There aren’t that many photos in general. Most people prefer to forget what they looked like when they weren’t happy with what they were seeing.
Successful thinning would just look like less hair overall and thinner hair overall without patchiness.
Anotherdude, I am with you. Photos of successful hair thinning or reducution would be awesome. More guys might be inclined to get LHR if they could see proof that it actually works, especially since the cost is so prohibitive to most. We tend to hear about non results so some encouraging news would be welcome. I am currently undergoing LHR for hair reduction on my legs and am cautiously optimistic for some visible reduction.
I can’t comment how it works in terms of thinning but I can definitely say it does work, laser hair removal is not a gimmic. I’m doing lhr on my forearms right now, and actually did take a picture before I started. I’ve only done one session but that was 9 days ago so I’m just starting to shed now. If you give me another week or so for the hair to totally shed, I can send a picture that shows what it’s like all smooth, then in a month or so when the hair has come back, before I do session two I can show what it looks like after just 1 session if that helps anyone. For other areas I’ve done like my abdomen and underarms, I don’t let it grow back I just have it away. I get virtually no ingrown hairs since doing laser so I could easily do that. Forearms because they’re so visible though and because it looks so ugly shaved, I will just let it grow back. Just need someone to remind me to take pics but would be happy to do it.
If you guys can keep track of your progress and take photos it will be great, even if you don’t have a before photo.And I wish that it all works out perfect for you. My confusion and concern is how even will the reduction look without patchiness when LHR is known for leaving some amounts of hair if they are not coarse enough. I’m also wondering how will reduction look esthetically on my thighs and legs if I have longer curly hairs. (I’m imagining sparse long hairs that will look “weird” compared to dense long hairs that are “packed” together that you can’t discern them individually and notice their length.)
Also, I think I have asked this before but I’m not really settled on the answer. I keep reading and hearing stories of how LHR “is not as permanent” as it sounds only electrolysis is. One guy told me that he had a full course of laser treatments done on his arms and legs and he was hairless, but after 4 years hair started emerging again almost like before treatment. He told me that the answers he received was that initially the LHR must have knocked out the roots, but not permanently so it took years for them to regenerate. He believes the reason was because his skin couldn’t take highest setting of energy and that’s why his LHR didn’t permanently kill off the roots. Anyone hear of such stories? The dreadful experience would be spending thousands of dollars and a year of treatments to only start seeing hair regrowing years down the road.
I don’t mind taking pictures, I do have before ones. My goal isn’t thinning though but the principle is the same, to thin you just do less treatments, so it should look the same.
As for the hair that grows back, it would look the same. They look the same, and aren’t weird looking. The only thing is you have to be careful because of the patchiness as you said. I think your body also plays a role in how patchy it comes back. Reason I say that is because I did 4 treatments on my abdomen, using IPL so not a true laser. The spot size though is large, and the area I treated wasn’t huge so its very difficult for her to miss spots. Also, with IPL for a few hours after the treatment, every hair that was zapped looks like a red dot, so my stomach would be covered in these everywhere and I could definitely tell that nothing was missed. The thing is after the 4 treatments, the hair that does come back is in random places just the odd hair here and there, with maybe 1 hair spaced out every centimetre, then in some spots there’s maybe 2 centimetres then two hairs and so on, so it doesn’t look overly natural. Where I think thinning would work the best is in an area where you have lots of coarse hair, but also thinner fine hair as well, so that you can get rid of all those big noticable hairs but the finer hair will remain and look natural.
Laser hair removal isn’t considered permanent removal, it’s rated as permanent hair reduction. This isn’t because the hair comes back later, but because it can’t target all hairs only dark coarse ones. So on those hairs it is permanent removal. If hair comes back after years on someone, then they most likely weren’t treated with the right settings or they were too low. You also have to find out what type of laser they used. If they did IPL for example, it’s not as strong as a true laser which could cause this.
If the tech is overlapping properly, there won’t be any patchiness. You would be able to tell this 2-3 weeks after the treatment judging by how shedding goes. If it was done properly, shedding would be pretty uniform too and you won’t be left with patchy spots.
Be careful! I decided to thin my super-dense bikini area and the technician did a terrible job. It is beyond patchy - it looks stupid. Now I am torn between trying to let her thin out the big areas she missed and just having her take everything off (which I definitely don’t want). Maybe it is possible to do natural, even thinning, but maybe there is a reason it’s hard to find pics. Good luck.
That’s brutal, I don’t know how someone can be so sloppy. When I did my forearms they had a crazy reaction, they were really red and looked like they were covered in mosquito bites all bumped up. This only lasted less than 5 minutes though but the nice thing is it’s easy to see if anything was missed!
Oh by the way I’ll have my after pictures in a couple weeks from session 1 on my forearms. I have the before ones, but right now I’m in the hair free smooth stage 
Just took another picture the first one is of course my before. The second is after 1 session of GentleLASE on 18mm at 16 joules. I just took the second picture 5 minutes ago, which is 3 days shy of 4 weeks. I’ll take another once the hair grows back to show what type of thinning I got.
Uh no idea if anyone can see the picture when I click it it goes to some generic hairtell site saying we’ve improved the forum, not sure how else to share an image…
nyc, how many treatments did you have?
Thanks for trying to post the photos. Can anyone help me open them? I keep getting a link to hairtell instead of actual pics.
That’s what I get too, I hope its not gone because I deleted it from my PC. I have them on my phone but not a single image, I’ll have to recreate it again and post it online somewhere else.
No I didn’t because I saw it supported images here so I uploaded it then deleted it when I was clearing my computer. I have them on my phone so I’ll redo it again shortly and upload to photobucket. It’s not too exciting, it doesn’t show thinning, it’s a before hairy picture and then the after is the smooth shedded phase. Still waiting for regrowth before I take the thinning pic.