Thankyou for the reply mr James.
My question is about hair on the body, not on the face. Hair on the face of men and women seem to be different from hair on the body when you read about peoples experiences.
The hair on my body has become much thinner than before IPL treatments and now it’s 7 months after my last treatment and it is still as thinn.
I’ve tried to do an experiment by plucking some hairs around my nipples to see if they will become coarse but they grow in just as slowly and in their thinner state.
Also I wonder, how do you mean that a body part would get more blood flow?
Pamd. Thankyou for your reply.
The laser practitoner I wrote to on the laser forum meant that the hairs usually remain fine. And she specifically meant that the individual hair remains finer, not that the overall growth is sparser (because I haven’t noticed any difference in the amount of hairs on body, just a significant difference in their coarsness).
This is her post:
"As a species, most of what we know, we’ve learned in the last 30 to 40 years. And the pace of what we are learning is accelerating, to the point that we know more and more about less and less. The problem is that we tend to forget to pay attention to what we don’t know. And unfortuantely, your questions really wrap around what we don’t know.
So let’s start about what we do know about hair and hair removal. We know that everyone is basically born with all the hair follicles that they are going to have. We also know that not all follicles are active at all times. Some follicles are never active. And some only become active during different stages of our life (puberty, menopause, etc). We also know that when a follicle is completely destroyed it does not come back.
Now let’s look at what we don’t know. We don’t know what part of the hair follicle is critical for destruction. Is it is the bulb, the bulge, or the entire follicle? What part do you have to destroy to really destroy the hair follicle? We don’t know why destroying some of the follicular cells results in finer hair. And we don’t know what happens to a hair follicle that is not completely destroyed. Will the hair follicle recover? No one knows.
But we can make some SWAGs (as opposed to WAGs). A WAG is a wild ass guess. A SWAG is a scientifically based wild ass guess.
So here are some of my SWAGs about what to expect. I think three things can happen to hair when it is treated. 1) the treatment kills the hair. 2) the treatment partially destroys the hair. 3) the treatment has no effect. My sense is that one of the reasons that we see finer hair is because the treatment partically destroys the hair follicle but does not kill it. In addition, there are hairs that are not treated-they are dormant during treatment or were missed (partially or completely).
My sense is that the hairs that we see that are finer are hairs that were treated but only partially killed. There is also some biopsies and histology that supports that theory. But I have seen people with coares hair interspersed among the finer hair and my sense is that the coarse hair is hair that was completely missed.
Whether fine hair will get coarse or not is an unknown. Again, my sense is that it has not for as long as we have been following our results. We started in 1997 and I have followed many people since then. Almost everyone who has poor results ends up seeing me at some point. Which is one of the reasons why we have learned as much as we know about what we do. I do not recall anyone who has hair that has significantly coarsen up over time. This is not to say that it can not happen, just that it isn’t common. Otherwise, I would be seeing people who would come in to complain about their hair having gotten thicker and coarser after it was fine.
This is not to say that it can’t happen. Just that among the thousands of clients we have had, it has not been an issue or something that we have seen. Now that isn’t to say that after 12 years it won’t back. We just haven’t followed people out that long. So we don’t know."
