Page 47 - Mike Murphy's Blog Posts

A15 - What is the ‘best’ interval between hair removal sessions (after treatment by lasers or IPLs)? PART 2.
I wrote a blog post back in September 2021 discussing my thoughts on the how to determine the optimum interval between laser/IPL hair sessions. It proved very popular amongst my readers.
But, as soon as I posted it I began to doubt my own conclusions. Back then I suggested that we should wait for an interval equal to the anagen phase of the hairs being treated. This was based on the idea that we should always try to treat as many anagen follicles as possible, every time (since all light-based treatments destroy only the anagen follicles).
Table 1: Data from Richards-Merhag and my own calculations
This means we need to wait until the time when most of the follicles are back in anagen. Unfortunately, we can never know, in reality, at what stage the follicles are in! It’s impossible to tell!!
So, I created a wee model using Excel to investigate this. I used the total duration of anagen- catagen-telogen data and constructed a spreadsheet for a number of body areas including the upper lip, chin, arm pits, arms, bikini and legs.
Mike’s Blog Posts 47