Hi again everyone
Writing in with sadder news and questions today. I was meeting up with a girlfriend, another nurse, who has received electrolysis. She lives in a different city and we were swapping stories today and the topic of clearance came up. I have presently spent about 4000 dollars for 50 hours of work, and I have never had clearance. Today I also noticed that some of the older hairs that used to bug me and that I tweezed out (everyone has the annoying ones that we remember) are still there. My electrologist said I had a lot of hair, so I just kept coming back for more sessions, sometimes every day of the week (different area of the face usually). Today I saw the posts by Karii (my girlfriend insisted I see them) and the journey she went through and realised that while I have had scabbing like that, I have never been that clear, and I started with less hair. I am disappointed, upset, and frustrated. Waxing, threading, tweezing - everything was cheaper than this and my skin was in my own hands, meticulously cared for. I used to get a scab once every week (ONE) with my tweezing or plucking and for so long now, I’ve been scabbed every damn day. I have stopped everything for electrolysis - working out, using salicylic acid (which has caused my face to break out in bunches) and for what? This is infuriating and I don’t know what to do. I started this because I was tired of waxing, tried shaving, hated it and didn’t want to do that anymore. But to be very honest, shaving is easier than this and smoother. Yes, the hair has gone down but again, 50 hours and never clear. This involves my face and full neck because I have long sideburns. So everything is still there to some degree just thin and I bet if I just waited it out, there would still be a fair amount of hair. Even after we “clear” an area, if I wait a while, it just comes back. The hair does appear finer but again, if I wait, some of those hairs I know so well come back and they aren’t supposed to right - they are just supposed to disappear?
This is beyond infuriating and I feel ripped off, but mostly I feel heartbroken that I thought I was investing into something legitimate that turned out to be an [curse word] scam.
How much hair did you have? DO you have any pre-pictures? Did your sessions last long enough or were they 15 minutes at a time per week? Did you cease using any temporary measures that pulled out hair while having electrolysis?
I don’t know how anyone can tell which hairs are “all back” and which ones are new? If hairs were color-coded and stamped with a date, then I could understand.
For me to get a first, full clearance on a compliant PCOS client, with neck, chin, sides of face, upper lip and lower lip hair it usually takes between 4-10 hours (depending on the amount of hair, using thermolysis, specifically, picoflash or synchro thermolysis. THAT’S ME. I can’t tell you what strategies other electrologist prefer and how long it takes.
People want the hair off FAST. They need relief, but the client should know that the first four- six months are the hardest and we can’t go faster than Mother Nature will allow. You have to be patient in those early months.
Also, if the client can’t tolerate more than 15 minutes per session, it will take longer to get a clearance.
I don’t have enough specifics to understand your situation, but nevertheless,
I attempted to explain some concepts.
I use blend, the slower technique, but I usually clear a woman’s face completely & permanently in about 30 visits. It takes about the first 3-4+ visits to clear a face of coarse hairs one time through depending on how much hair we have, and the settings are the most painful at the beginning. Then I clear it at each of the following visits of any regrowth or resting hairs that just woke up, then finer hairs that I didn’t get to the first time through. They are done by 30 visits with the exception of once or twice a year touch up for whatever brand new hairs the body made. Try using lots of aloe vera gel, it really helps prevent scabbing.
Having said that, if you are a woman who has shaved daily for many years, and have hairs that are as thick and as dense (close together) as a man’s beard, it will take me about 20+ hours to clear it the first time through instead of 3-4+ hours. You cannot expect to undo years of stimulation in a few visits, but in general, you should see a steady improvement over time.
If you have been tweezing and plucking for many years then you may have had far more hair than you ever realized. Some of the “same hairs” you think are returning could well be old dormant hairs making a reappearance. Also, have you had a full medical evaluation to determine why you are growing so much facial hair? Electrolysis can only remove the hairs you have now; it cannot stop hormones from stimulating new ones to pop up down the road. I am dealing with that very issue now; my face has been cleared for over a decade, but after a bad bout of illness during which I was prescribed high doses of steroids, some of my tiny blonde facial hairs converted into darker, coarser hair and I am having to have treatment on them for the first time in over 13 years.
Having said that, I don’t think your treatment strategy sounds very efficient. If you’ve been going in every day at times but only now reached 50 hours (yet without one clearance?) then it sounds like your appointments must be very short. Also, as I am sure others will point out, facial work should not be causing regular scabbing, nor is it necessary to stop one’s whole life or stop working out to have treatment. I can guarantee you aren’t being “ripped off” (which implies deliberate fraud or deception) but you might be working with somebody who’s technique isn’t the best.
If I were you I’d get a second or even third consultation with other electrologists and find somebody who can see you less frequently, but for longer, and who can try and get as close to a full clearance each time. I used to have very severe facial hair, and I would go for a long session on Friday afternoon, then have a couple of days to recover before I had to go back to work. Nobody ever noticed, and I rarely had “scabbing.” Remember, it can take six months or so on the face to notice a huge reduction, but when it does happen it will be very apparent.
Well, regardless of the length of the appointments, 50 hours is quite a large amount of time, and - as Soft Touch pointed out - more than enough to have that job done. At least if the 50 hours were actually treatment time.
Of course only if there was no interfering treatment, notably waxing or some other kind of plucking during that time.
Hi again guys
Thank you for your help. My electrologist has standard treatment hours - 75 minutes per session unless you can’t make it. So I have been getting that amount of treatment per session over 50 hours.
I used to wax, tweeze, thread, sugar, etc, you name it. I let the hair grow out for about 6 weeks, hated my life. My friend bought me a laser treatment which required me to shave. Hated that, and then the very next day, I made the plunge for electrolysis.
I am from a very small town with no other specialists who do this; the ones who are say they aren’t taking new clients. I don’t want to mention the name here because my electrologist frequents hairtell and I would rather not “out” him by mentioning the city publically - I respect that he does have a business to run even if my treatments have been going so poorly.
I have received a full medical work up. I am a nurse married to another nurse and when I started noticing this shortly after our wedding and mentioned it to him, that was the first thing he suggested but the workup was negative.
We don’t earn buckets of cash. I invested this into electrolysis because the provider told me that they could do a good job. If it’s been 50 hours and they haven’t stopped to reevaluate what things may be going wrong on their end if I keep coming in and they keep treating the area over and over without clearance, I feel that they must not really care.
Anytime I mention it, the response is the same “Oh it’s getting better, there’s just a lot of hair.” There are hairs that we have treated multiple times over 50 hours. I know this because there are clusterings of thick coarse dark hairs in amongst a lot of fine light hair which I have been tweezing for over a decade, and some grow a certain way (curly, weird angle etc) that I remember because they were such a pain to tweeze. Some of this hair is the same hair. I know there is a lot of hair but if women with more hair can get a clearance in like 10 hours and it’s been 50 and I have never had a single time when my face looked clear (like I waxed it, which again isn’t perfect but does make me look ‘clear’), that is just really saddening and disappointing.
I have not waxed or plucked or threaded or sugared during treatment. I let the hairs grow and if I needed to, I took a fine scissors and clipped them but kept them long enough for removal by him.
What type of doctor ordered the lab work?
Did he/she suggest you take any medicine?
Maybe the wrong tests were ordered or misinterpreted.
IMHO, you should see an endocrinologist.
Even a dermatologist will be more knowledgable than an internist or an ob/gyn.
If your hirsutism turns out to be idiopathic, there are still drugs to influence it.
Mhmm, I hope You are aware, that You more or less outed Your electrologist?
I dont think your expectations have been set correctly.
It is impossible for any electrologist to estimate on hair that has been tweezed repeatedly , most especially in the 3 months prior to electrolysis. there is no possible way we can know how much hair you have tweezed out. Given that you admit to doing so for well over a decade prior it is likely to be a CONSIDERABLE amount of hair, and that’s justthe stuff you CANT see. There is going to be an 8-12 week minimum eriod if you tweeze a hair before that hair will regrow.
Whatever time you spent in the first 3 months doing hair removal , assuming you were attaining full clearances by the end of that period, will be your starting point at making any estimates.If you didnt obtain full clearance in that first 3 months the hair growth would carry over into the next 3 month period. It’s going to be ever diminishing amounts for every 3 month period after that for a minimum of 12-18 months for the face.
I’ve seen serious plucking cases go well in excess off 130 hours in the first 10 months of treatment. 10 hours? Not a snowballs chance in hell. And YES some hairs, will regrow and be removed more than once during that process. There is not an electrologist on the planet that can quote you a 100% kill rate. This is how the process works.
Your electrologist is NOT responsible for your previous plucking, nor are they responsible for your hair growth.
These hairs sound like they are severely distorted hair follicles from repeated tweezing.
Thermolysis is almost, but not quite, useless against such hairs because you cannot tell where the follicle parts you need to destroy are, and may not be able to acess them even if you do. The solution is sometimes to use blend on these distorted follicles because the liquid lye accesses all parts of the follicle , whereas the heat from thermolysis we cant quite get there.
It’s likely however your electrologist is proceeding in thermolysis to get rid of the bulk of hair that is NOT severely distorted, and will clean up these hairs at the end with blend, which might be a little less efficient for the large volume of hair. If distorted hairs are returning, its because they arent dead. They arent dead because they are severely distorted from plucking.Again this is not an unusual scenario.They can be killed.