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By Rebecca, June 27, 2009 10:09 am

I fucking cut my nipple while shaving! Dammit, that hurts! I’m ready for the laser removal to be done so I don’t have to deal with shaving my chest anymore…

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By Rebecca, June 10, 2009 10:38 pm

I’ve seen some searches coming in lately about laser hair removal, as well as the No! No! hair removal system, and I wanted to post an update.

First, should you spend money on a No! No!?

No. No. You should not.

(Sorry, I had to.)

I’m not convinced that it can’t work, but it must take forever and was difficult and unsatisfying to use. I don’t think it contributed to any hair removal for me, and buffing afterwards did not leave me smooth and clean as promised. It also ended up smelling like burnt hair, which wasn’t particularly pleasant. (As a side note, if you want my No! No! let me know and I’d be happy to hand it over.)

So what should you do instead?

Continue reading 'Hair removal followup'»

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By Rebecca, September 2, 2008 12:13 am

A comment on this post asked for a little more detail on what laser hair removal entails (although G thought the commenter’s description, “I just picture you lying on a table while doctors shoot lasers at you and you whimper,” was pretty acurate to her understanding as well). (And, for those of you who’d like to skip ahead toward the end, where there’s a good bit involving how much it did hurt, feel free to do so now.)

First, lets cover how it works. Laser hair removal works by “selectively heating dark target matter, (melanin), in the area that causes hair growth, (the follicle), while not heating the rest of the skin.” (So sayeth Wikipedia.) What that means is they shoot a laser at a small area of skin and the wavelength is tuned to be absorbed by the melanin, destroying the follicle’s ability to grow hair. The area hit by the laser varies between specific lasers but (from my experience) is generally a bit smaller than the size of a dime. This means doing a large area (say, arms, legs, and torso) takes a long time and the denser or thicker the hair (facial hair or thick leg hair) takes longer. In addition, hair grows in cycles, meaning the hair growing now is not the hair that will be growing two months from now. So even if laser hair removal were 100% effective on active follicles (which it probably isn’t) you’d still need multiple sessions every couple months to cover each set of follicles as they become active, usually around every two months.

After a session, the hair will seem to be growing back at first but then (hopefully) the individual hairs will fall out. This is because there’s a little bit of hair still existing below the surface that doesn’t get removed with shaving (hence why waxing works for a longer period than shaving) and that little root beneath the skin still needs to get pushed out. Then, there’s a relatively hairless month, followed by a gradual return of hair as the next wave of follicles become active. (But hopefully less hair than was growing before!)

After that, it’s rinse and repeat.

Continue reading 'How Laser Hair Removal Works'»