I have read a lot of information on there that to get the best results for most areas 12 weeks is a good amount of time to wait between treatments, and that you should wait until hair has grown back in. However when I had my treatment I told the laser removalist that I wanted to wait longer than 6 weeks because I didn’t see any hair regrowth (she recommended 6 weeks). She said that the treatment would be more effective at 6 weeks because even if you cant see hardly any hair regrowth, many of the hair folicles will be producing hair in the growing stage that hasn’t come to the very surface of the skin, and the laser will be very effective on these hairs. Does anyone know if this may be true?
Most techs just blindly follow whatever their sales rep tells them is “best” and most of that has to do with getting more money from the customers. There is no point of treating hair that’s not there yet.
Even if a few hairs are already in anagen underneath the skin, many others aren’t yet at that point. Anagen lasts for at least several weeks. There is no advantage to treating early.
If I might say, we have the same problem in electrolysis. Most places one might go, don’t tell you the optimum schedule to work on, and simply ask you how much time you want to book, (if they don’t limit that as well, by saying we don’t work more than one hour on any client) and then when the treatment is done, they say, “So when do you want to come back?”
They should be saying, “Ok, that area will be visually clear for about 3 weeks, but I can treat hairs before you see hairs. If this is all you want cleared, you can come back in any time between 3 to 8 weeks. If you want to increase the work area, you can come back sooner.”
Oh, but then again, some people don’t even do full clearances, and just spread the work out, so you don’t actually have any cleared areas, until many months later.
The bottom line, you need to learn enough to know what works best for your goals, and steer your practitioner’s work in that direction.
With electrolysis, it can be beneficial to come in a bit earlier since it’s a bit easier to kill younger weaker hair. Laser works best on more mature hair because it’s more coarse, so it’s best to wait a bit for latter anagen.