Hi. I’m from Alberta, Canada and new to this forum. I enjoy the posts here and want to add mine. I’ve been plucking facial hair for 15 years since I started getting them after pregnancy. I am 50 and the possibility of being in a situation (hospital visit, long trip) prompted me to look into permanent hair removal. I thought I had about 20 hairs and once I left them alone to prepare for electrolysis was shocked, as everyone is, to find they were in the 100’s. I started my treatment in October and had galvanic. The electrologist, trained in Chile, does all three but prefers galvanic as she feels the other two don’t work very well. I had two 2-hour appointments weekly until the beginning of December. As galvanic is so slow it took that long to get clearance, excluding my lip and sideburns, which she never touched. She told me that the hairs treated would be killed the first time and new hairs would be the result of having more than one hair in the follicle or a hair that was appearing for the first time. I began reading this forum in November and started to have doubts about her claims. But now I’m not so sure. It’s the middle of January and I have only had a few odd hairs show up. These are taken care of in a few minutes every two weeks. Either she is very good or galvanic would seem to be the way to go for a small area. She was expensive but since a lot of the work she did seems to have been a one-time shot it’s starting to look like it was worth it, from a time perspective for sure.
However, I had to stop going to her because she moved. My new electrologist dislikes galvanic preferring blend and flash. She seems very qualified and was even an instructor for many years before going back into private practice with her daughter. I started going to her at the beginning of December and she and her daughter have been doing mainly my upper lip (lots of mostly fine blonde hairs with a few tree trunks), sideburns (long and fine blonde) and leftovers from galvanic. She’s using blend. This is going much slower. I go for an hour every two weeks and they do a clearing. Or it is to them but I’m not sure I agree. I can still feel some coarse hairs and some fine ones after my treatment. I do see progress so perhaps they are sticking to the 1/2 hour only for the lip rule. The pain is tolerable except for under the nose which hurts like heck. I’m using EMLA there so we’re getting through it.
While doing my bi-weekly appointments for my face I also booked additional appointments to do my legs. I have long gross hair on the insides and backs of my thighs, which I hate, so that’s were I started. I had a four-hour appointment with both electrologists, one to a leg doing flash. I didn’t use any EMLA because I thought I could breeze through this. Boy was I wrong. It REALLY hurt. After half an hour they had to apply EMLA to the rest of my thighs. I wasn’t able to get optimal freezing but it helped somewhat. At the two-hour point I was sweating but insisted on going ahead and they were able to finish. The next day my thighs were a sight to behold. They didn’t hurt but where every insert was made was a red bump which turned into scabs within the next few days. I have to admit I perversely enjoyed looking at them because they looked like they should be really painful, but they weren’t at all. Three weeks later the scabs are gone. They are still bumpy and red but that’s my fault. I love to scratch (yes I do know better) and the itchiness from the healing was too much for me to ignore so I’ve spent the last week scratching far too much. The result is that they started to look worse and I got concerned. I stopped scratching and bought some tea tree oil last night and put it on. It stinks but I love this oil. It’s so cooling it’s like putting Vicks Vaporub on. I’m not as itchy today and they look a little less red so I’ll continue with the oil and I promise not to touch. I have another long appointment in February to do a clearing on the second crop that should have appeared by then. It seems like I have a lot of hairs coming out of the follicles that were treated the first time and I’m hoping that it’s a second hair from the same follicle and not a follicle that was zapped and the hair wasn’t removed. I’ll put up with the pain as long as it’s working but to have the pain and not have the hair affected at all is too awful. Also on my next visit I’m going to ask them to turn down the setting; I think it may have been too high painwise. I’m glad that the two of them working were able to get a full clearing in one appointment and that’s why I’ve booked one more long appointment. When I start on my lower legs I am not going to do it the same way, however. Having both legs jolted for that long is just too unpleasant. There is never any respite.
Sorry for the long post but that brings me up to date and I’ll post my updates. I’m very curious to see how the galvanic areas are over the next year compared to the blend areas.
I will also soon be having a different electrologist. My current one is moving out of province so I’ll be trying the new owner in May. I hope I continue to be lucky.