Page 64 - Chapter 3 - An Introduction to Laser/IPL Hair Removal

Chapter 3 – Fundamentals of Laser/IPL Hair Removal 1st Edition
What cannot be treated?
There are certain conditions when light-based treatments should not be applied. These include body sites where the hairs have been plucked, tweezed, electrolysed or removed using depilation creams. In these situations, the target hair is not available. You will need to wait until the hair regrows before beginning any treatments.
Proper language when talking to clients/patients
We often see laser/IPL operators commenting on social media about their patients/clients following treatments. They say things like “the hair grew back a few weeks later” or “there was a lot of re-growth”.
This should not be true! If the treatments were carried out correctly (with the proper fluence, wavelengths, pulsewidth etc) then any hair which is seen after treatments should NOT be “re- growth”- it should be “new” growth – follicles which have gone into anagen since the previous treatment(s).
In other words, the choice of language is very important here. ‘New’ growth is not ‘re-growth’.
In reality, we will always see a mixture of ‘re-growth’ and ‘new’ growth. Nobody is 100% efficient when treating hair (or any other skin condition!!), so we will always miss some follicles in a treatment.
Consequently, when your client/patient returns they will present some brand new hairs which were not available in previous treatments, AND some hair in follicles which were not effectively killed in previous treatments.
So, please use the correct language, and please correct your clients/patients when the return for treatments. Tell them that they are looking at a combination of new hair and some re-growing hair, and explain why...
Treatment Timings
There appears to be much confusion in the world regarding the optimum times to treat hairs! Given that there is quite a range of anagen and telogen phase durations, it is actually very tricky to figure this out using intuition alone.
So, we constructed a mathematical model to try and figure out the ‘best’ times.
What are the optimum hair removal intervals?
Laser/IPL hair removal has been around, commercially, since the late 1990s. Many clinical studies have been carried out around the word looking at the optimum wavelength(s). fluences, pulsewidths etc. However, very little work has been done on the ‘best intervals between repeat
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