First of all, I can not tell you how many hours it will take to do anything on a person I have not seen, and won’t be working on myself. Telling you what I would guess would be my ability to enact change on your situation would serve no good purpose, when what you really need to know is what will you get from the person who actually WILL be performing this service for you.
You may answer your own question of how long it will take if you take a square centimeter of skin on your left cheek, mark it off, and have someone count the hairs in that square centimeter. That will give you the number of hairs per square centimeter you have. Now measure the length and width of your treatment area in centimeters and multiply the length times the width measurement, and then multiply that times the number of hairs per square centimeter you have. This is how many hairs you have in a growth cycle to remove. In the worst case situation, (you know, what you plan for, and hope you never have to face) you will have to remove that number of hairs 3 times before you are finished.
Now divide the number of hairs per hour YOUR electrologist can remove ON YOUR TREATMENT AREA in an hour, and you will know how many hours you will need just by dividing the number of hairs treated you will need, by the number of treatment hairs per hour your electrologist can remove.
Now you know why no one wants to discuss how long it will take!
There is much on the site already about pre treatment care, and after treatment care, so I will only say here that you need to stay hydrated, (drink a healthy amount of WATER!), eat right, exercise, get restful sleep, practice good hygiene both before and more importantly after treatment, and use Aloe Vera, after treatment to help soothe and heal the skin. Aloe Based Cortisone will also help if you have skin that is irritated and red, and Tea Tree Oil overnight helps the skin heal very quickly. Most of my clients do tea tree oil at night, and aloe vera gel in the morning.
Tend Skin is an acid. It also has a soothing effect for some people. Some would put it on right after treatment, and some electrologists do this in their office. I am not saying that this is a bad practice, but I personally would wait till later on this one. Perhaps an hour or three after treatment, and then use it overnight in place of, or in addition to the tea tree oil. Since its function is exfoliation, one would not want to put it on with the Aloe Vera, they are at opposite purpose after all.
Although you would think that the information on how long it took to get that client to that point would be helpful to you, it would not be as helpful as you would think. You don’t have the same number of hairs per square inch (this client had 500 hairs per square inch when we started!). You don’t have the same growth pattern(thank the lord the hairs were neat and in a line facing one direction but the entire face and neck was covered in hair even in places where others are bare), and that client did not get treatments done on the perfect schedule (we quickly got to the place where simply treating hairs could keep shaving to a minimum and then eliminated shaving all together), so we did not finish in the shortest time I could have possibly finished. Even with all this, what you may be interested to know, is that the client mentioned got to look finished in the early going (first 4 to 6 weeks), and still we completed over 160,000 hairs in 250 hours of work spread out over 24 months. 
Counting all those hairs and putting them in a pillow was the hard work 
Just kidding, my Epilators keep track of the epilations and the hours of treatment. I should point out here that the count listed does not include follicles that had multiple hairs growing out of them unless it took more than one insertion to treat them. Since the client once utilized plucking as a daily hair removal method, there were many of those. The true count on this client may actually be near 300,000 hairs removed.
So once again, that is lots of information, but not much of that will have any relation to what you and your practitioner will end up doing. I should point out here that I had another, more “normal” client who I completed in 30 hours spread out over 9 months and over 10,000 hairs.
See the range these things can span? 
If I had told the first person I could clear him in 30 hours, I would be in big trouble indeed! Had I told the second person 250 hours, he would have been unnecessarily concerned about the time and cost involved. That’s why we always tell you to come in for a FREE consultation and Sample Treatment. That way, you know what to expect, and we can get a feel for what you need done. After all, the second client had less hairs per square inch in all his growth phases put together than the one you looked at had visible on the first day we met.
Now if you have read all that way down to here, you need to go to your kid’s graduation party, you missed the Bar-Mitzva somewhere back in the middle of this book. 
[ August 13, 2003, 01:35 PM: Message edited by: James W. Walker VII, CPE ]
If I had told the first person I could clear him in 30 hours, I would be in big trouble indeed! Had I told the second person 250 hours, he would have been unnecessarily concerned about the time and cost involved. That’s why we always tell you to come in for a FREE consultation and Sample Treatment. That way, you know what to expect, and we can get a feel for what you need done. After all, the second client had less hairs per square inch in all his growth phases put together than the one you looked at had visible on the first day we met.