Went for a consult with an Electrolysis for the blond vellus hair on much my face. She told me that the danger in treating such hair is that sometimes after Electrlsis the hair can grown back as a dark hair rather than blonde. True or false?
[size:23pt]FALSE!!![/size]
Pleased to hear that is false! We are looking into working on this type of hair in the future and I would be very alarmed if this happened!
If I could hijack this posting … an electrologist recently told me that sometimes by treating these fine vellus hairs on the face it can stimulate the surrounding follicles into turning into accelerated vellus hairs or terminals - is this true? Please let this be false also!
[size:20pt]False too!!![/size]
The same girl (12 years)
December 2011. Before
April 2012. After the first and only partial clearing. (1 hour)
GOOD TO KNOW !!
Fairygirl, I am very interested in what you learn as I have facial hair very similar to what you showed in the photo…ive seen various E’s , spent much more than 1000 so far just on my face and there is barely a dent in the situation! agh. josie …please clone yourself !!
Wow, thats amazing that that is only treatment and also 4 months later! Her skin looks so perfect and untouched but the hair is gone. I wish this was “standard” work performed by all electrologists. The difference between a fantastic one and a not so fantastic one is incredible.
I have several little pits on the corners of my upper lip which Im sure will go over time but are a dead giveaway that Ive had electrolysis done. Luckily it was just a practice run on my old battered skin and not my daughter’s delicate face.
Josefa and many others on here are just legends. I wish everyone had access to you fabulous people. Thank goodness for this website.
Danika, thats awful that you have spent so much money and got nowhere 
I hope you find someone soon that can help you with those pesky fine hairs. A lot of electrologists I have phoned about these are unwilling to touch them and only deal with the hard coarse whiskery hairs. Some have even told me that laser is much more appropriate for treating these hairs even though I have told them they are blonde and fine! What!
That’s the target the Kelly tip .002" IBP was developed for.
I have a 13 year old coming Sunday with very fine lip hair and will be using the Kelly’ tips on a three blank with a 2 tip. They arrived today Mike. Thanks! I ll let you know how it goes.
WOW Josefa !! Such beautiful work in so little time!!
Fairygirl, I hear that too!
Just returned from my appoint. 27 minutes…hair removal time id say actually maybe 20 minutes of hair being removed??..Over 80.00 …also why does 30 minutes cost 70 …not so professional after all . I give up …I just cant afford this anymore. Good bye
I don’t know that anyone would answer this question if I did not, so, here I go, doing the lightning rod thingy, where I go where others fear to tread, only to have people come in behind me to gripe about my answer.
I will start this by restating an electrolysis “in joke” that goes, “Good Electrolysists lose all their best clients – Because they finish the job!” 
While we all get a smile out of that, the reality is that upon starting an electrolysis service, one has to pay up front and take the stance, “If you build it, they will come.” This is the main reason why first year practitioners rarely have an Apilus Platinum a Stereo Microscope and an electric motion chair in a marble floored office next door to a dentist, and a gynecologist.
What ever their initial investment in the business, it may all be hanging over them in the form of credit card payments, home equity mortgage or a loan from Uncle Charlie, so they can’t afford to miss a payment on that.
Do you hate going to home offices? Well, understand that any electrolysis practitioner not operating out of their home is paying rent and other expenses that suck up massive amounts of treatment time just to get to make the first dollar they can keep each month. In your first months of business, someone operating out of a rented office space is in a race to get to profitability before they run out of the ability to continue to lose money on the rent and other overhead that hits them monthly no matter how many treatment hours they sell, or don’t sell. Along the way, are things like, probes/needles, forceps/tweezers, sterilization paraphernalia and so on. those things are not cheap. Every tweezer/forceps I use, costs me over $20 alone. Clients want us to treat their appointment as if we are doctors until it is time to be paid, then they want us to treat their appointment like Sadie the back ally hair style lady.
Next up, we sell time. Funny thing about that is, most people all want the same time. I have often joked with my friends in the business, that we could make more, and work less, if we got together in a single location, had 20 practitioners working out of that location just to cover the 3 to 6 hours everybody wants to book. Depending on where you are, those hours may be different, but most places, it is 9 - noon, and 3 - 6. Your practitioner has to juggle everyone asking for the same hours, assuming she has found enough people to be asking for time on the same days yet. This all the while with an eye on the recurring expenses.
To put it simply, If we could get everyone to pre-pay us, up front, and schedule time back to back, we could make this business cost less, and pass the savings on to the clients. What happens, instead is, we juggle the schedule, to try to make time for everyone, and Myrtle is late, or doesn’t show up at all, thus throwing the entire day off. Clients don’t like paying for missed appointments, or paying for the time they were not in the office when they are late, but since all we have to sell is our time, and that time was reserved for you, we either have to raise prices on everyone to cover this, or make the offenders pay, so we don’t charge everyone for the sins of the few.
Next up, while you may have an appointment scheduled for 15 minutes, your actual time, where you have the attention of the practitioner is more like 30 minutes, to an hour, as most of us don’t have wait staff, so we have to do all the greeting, scheduling, prep and post treatment work on you as well. There is really no such thing as a 5 minute appointment. In fact, the person with the 5 min appointment, is usually the person who takes up the most of your time in a day filled with 15 minute appointments. We have all had a client say something like, “How come you charged me for X amount of time, when we were only working for Y amount of time, by my count?” As if the pre and post treatment is not a part of the treatment, or removing ingrown hairs is somehow free time. (My worst case of this was a client who I had billed for 3 hours 20 minutes, when she had taken up well over 6 hours of my actual time, and she had the nerve to dispute the bill, saying she thought it was “arbitrarily high” :o I reminded her of the movies she watched during her treatments, none of which were less than 2 hours each, and pointed out that I had stopped the billing clock any time I was answering her questions, or otherwise talking to her, or when she took a break for any reason. It was a real, “Are You Kidding Me” moment.)
During my research into this business, and I have found it to be confirmed in my experience talking to folks in the business all these years, I found stats that said people who work in this industry part time average 400 billable hours a year, while full timers average about 800 billable hours a year. Don’t get that stat wrong, we work crazy hours, when one considers how much time we put into the business. We just don’t get paid for much of it. Now ask yourself this; what hourly rate would you ask for, if you had to live off of 400 to 800 hours of work for the year? Some people have attempted to cover the fact that a short appointment person is taking away the ability to do a longer appointment, by charging a larger per minute rate for shorter appointments, or more per minute for jobs that are extra taxing on the practitioner, thus rendering her unable to work on others that day. (That’s one reason why bikini work costs more at many businesses)
While clients only see the time they are actually getting treatment, the expenses of running an electrolysis service are many, and lots of them are recurring expenses that must be paid on time, just to keep things going. While one might always make enough over the course of the year to cover these, one does not always make enough within a certain term to cover some of these inside that time frame and for that reason, we must set our rates accordingly. If you want to get a better rate, it usually involves committing to a particular practitioner, and making lump sum payments up front, and taking treatment times that are outside of the business’ “prime-time”.
Now I hope this did not sound like I was being mean, or angry at your question. I also hope others will add to this. I don’t have time to give it more attention, and it probably could use some more discussion.
[size:11pt]James I agree with everything you said and appreciate that you took the time to write. Makes total sense to me. I have no issue paying the fees with a professional who does work such as yours, & other pros on this board. However there are alot of unprofessional practioneres out there and they also charge these high fees. I paid a woman for years to do my eyebrows and am now repaying to redo the same area. Ouch. I live under the poverty line myself and it has taken all my cash to cover these costs. I make an appointment for every two weeks at the same time and I have not missed any appointments. The electrolysist decides how long the session will be for and I never know till she tells me we are done. There is enough hair to go for the full hour but if she decides to only do 20 minutes as the next client is booked/waiting and I have to pay even more for that then a full 30 minutes work then it burns the cash up the hair is still there and it feels like the costs are all over the road. Anyways there are several other reasons i must end treatment here so it is not just due to the fees.
In EVERY field there are people who are passionate and they love what they do. In many cases they have a little bit of a sliding scale when they feel certain clients circumstances warrant a bit of a discount here or there. Actually Mr. Bono who is certainly more an expert than the person i have seen charges quite a bit less and definatly shows more passion for the work. And you as well as i know that in any field there are some people that are quite simply ALL ABOUT THE MONEY!! [/size]
BAck to the topic posted, I asked the practitioner again this original question and once again she said definitely “positively YES.” I didnt quite follow the explanation but something about the pigment structure of blonde hair and where it sits in the follice and how after treatment it is altered and the follicle shrinks and that is when a shorter smaller darker hair can result.
HOWEVER TO BE CLEAR, I AM JUST SHARING WHAT WAS SAID BUT I DO TRUST JOSEFA’S opinion more than others as i respect her level of expertise.
What you have said makes total sense. I can’t see how once can book an appointment for an hour, and have the practitioner arbitrarily cut treatment short AND charge a higher per minute rate on top of all that. After all, one would make more money by doing four 15 minute appointments at the higher rate, than one single hour long appointment.
I guess it is like the fact that some businesses even charge you for the time you are in the restroom, and for consultations, and anything else they can come up with.
Thanks Danika. Not the first time an electrologist misinterprets the results of their own work. Does this mean that things have gone wrong? not at all. We humans have a bad habit of appropriating a role that only nature has, so when fine blond hairs begin to become more apparent because of the natural individual’s hair development, we believe that we have caused this change.
It is logical to reach this conclusion because if before you see that all were thin and blond hair, and a few months later you see darker hairs in the same area, you think this has been caused by any of the currents used.
However, it is not. An electrologist with several years of experience should know that the hair on the upper lip of a girl between 10/12 to 25/30 years will experience changes whether if you leave untouched area or not. Only the electrolysis prevent hair “vellus” becomes a terminal hair.
I’ve seen too many cases evolve female facial hair to be sure of my statements about.
Here is another example of upper lip of a 16 year old girl.
Before. (March 2012).
After one clearance. (November 2012).
Thanks Josefa. ANd yes James I am booked and totally willing to stay the hour because there has not yet ever been a true clearance but it is out of my control and indeed I am paying more at her whim. Once again I am super disappointed and will no longer be getting E done here. And YES i have also been to a place that charged me for my entire visit though only a fraction of it was actual E time…BIG SIGH>>>
Danika, are you keeping a regular schedule with your treatments? I think you not sticking with someone and establishing a routine greatly hinders the results that you perceive, and you can have other areas worked on while you’re there. You know, when i used to goto my electrologist i would ask her to do other sections that i wanted free of hair to fill in the time. For example a 15 min session for cleaning up my beard area translated into eyebrow area a bit on my cheeks etc…
Moreover, this argument lacks logic. We all know how the follicles are miniaturized by the laser to the point of producing a finer hair and less pigmented. This is due to impact at the base of the follicle (where there was much pigment in anagen).
ilike DIY I have not found a good E in my hometown so I do not have a regular schedule . I have had some hours of work done out of town in one city and since i have been in this other city, I have had a regular schedule for the last couple months but that will also end and I will return home . There really never was a clearance here…seems they dont work that way on the face ;(