olivetalks

If you have been following my posts on the bikini sessions, you might have noticed I have increased the frequency of the laser treatments.That’s because I could not make up my mind on how often to do it! Last week I was saying that I was going to explain how the laser machine works, for those of you finding all the hair growth cycle explanations as confusing as I did. I am going to simplify it as much as possible, because quite honestly, the only reason I’m interested is because I want to find the most effective way of getting rid of those hairs! So I better understand how it works…

Both the instructions and any pages about hair growth in the Internet, talk about hair being in one of three stages:

Anagen or active phase (when it’s growing), Catagen or degradation phase (when it’s just there) and Telogen or resting phase (when the hairs fall out)… And hairs can only be treated effectively with the laser, when they are in the growth phase.

Ok, so whatever I do, I will only affect the ones growing. Gotcha.

In a single treatment not all the hair follicles in the active phase will be destroyed. Some may be miniaturized into light fine hairs and others enter prolonged dormancy. Armpits have a density of 65 hairs per square cm of which 28% are in resting phase (which lasts 3 months) and 69% are in the active growth phase.

I’ve been saying that I have 4 hairs per cm² in my armpits. From 4 to 65 there are lots of hairs! I wonder what am I missing… besides 61 hairs… Never mind. So they say there are 65 hairs in a cm². Of those 65, 45 will be growing (blue bars) and 18 resting (red bars). We’ll ignore the 2 degrading ones. The black horizontal line represents the skin.

So then I go and laser the cm². Remember the laser’s dimensions? If not, see the images of day 2. So I will have to pass the laser almost 3 times to cover the whole cm² (the red rectangle in the following image represents the laser…)

And they say that not all of them will be “killed”. Some will evade us, others ignore us…

And some of those resting ones will appear in a few weeks:

 

So you might notice an improvement (or slight deforestation) from the first image to the fourth, but overall the process is going to be slow. And because the hairs don’t just fall off, you cannot really know in hairy areas how many hairs did you get each time, at least not until some time has passed.

At the same time, if you actually see the hairs growing, surely they are in their growing phase?

So my conclusions are:

• in areas with high density of hairs (like armpits), I am going to try to be patient and just laser them every 3 or 4 weeks. This way, in theory, the hairs there will be those I have to target. And I will scan the area in a patient and orderly manner: ie zap, move, zap, move…
• in areas like the bikini line, where you actually see the independent hairs, I will target each hair directly (one by one if I have to, but using the scan mode) once per week if the bast* sorry, the darlings, have decided to continue growing.

60 minutes later…

I wish I were rich and didn’t have to do it myself because it can become tedious… So today I lasered the bikini-line for the 5th time. I cannot say if the reason I have less hair in the area is because I’ve killed them already or just a result of me trimming them every week and therefore more often than ever before.

More information next week. Bye bye!

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