Page 251 - Chapter 3 - Laser/IPL Hair Removal

Chapter 3 – Fundamentals of Laser/IPL Hair Removal 2nd Edition
Summary of Laser/IPL Hair Removal – the Salient Points
There are some salient points which must be understood to ensure good outcomes from these treatments.
What are the main points to consider?
1. We wish to kill unwanted hair follicles using light and heat;
2. We do not want to damage the surrounding skin;
3. We want to ensure that the follicles do not regrow.
That’s it, in a nutshell. So, how do we do this?
Firstly, we must only choose candidates with the ‘right’ hair colour and skin colour (for the technology being used).
Next, we must choose the most appropriate fluence which we set according to the depth of the follicles in that body area. We can find that information in Table 14, in the second last column. Remember that the fluence will depend on your laser/IPL since they all have different absorptions in hair.
Having chosen our fluence, we can set our pulsewidths – as described before, the choice of pulsewidth becomes trivial when the correct fluence is selected. Anywhere between 1 and 100ms is fine, in most cases. With some diode lasers, you may require a longer pulse to achieve the desired fluence – that should be fine too.
Now we need to select the most appropriate skin cooling – this is very important! Firstly, the most efficient skin cooling method is ice-packs. But they must be frozen, not cold water. Otherwise, they will not have a sustained cooling effect.
________________________________________________________________________ 251 Chapter 3, Ed. 2.0 Laser/IPL Hair Removal
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