In our private interview I ended up with:

So, after 4 months (that’s 180 EUR times 4, ouch!), are the hairs still growing? just some? did they fall out?….

And, after sighing, he answered:

Let’s see LadyRostand, the idea is that the hairs continue to grow, but like 30% of them fall off. With each session, 30% of the hairs you have fall (but they do not disappear completely, some of them regenerate). I didn’t see any hairs fall, but there were some hairs that if you touched them, they’d fall on your hand. Once you start with the treatment, you must never pluck them again, because that does not help. The hairs do come back, but in less quantity. What happens is you see less hairs in general. They are thinner, more delicate, they take longer to appear. I don’t know, you do notice it. It’s weird. But, as I said, it’s a long process!

So if my friend with four visits to a professional salon (spread over 4 months) thinks that the improvement is a general decrease in hairs, but not a complete localized “boldness”, it’s normal that I do not see great achievements yet. Encouraging

I had a discussion with ZoltarStark on how does the Rio laser hair remover really work and it took us a while to finally understand it. I am going to draw some pictures for next week to try to clarify it in simpler terms in olivetalks, in case more people find the explanations in the booklet and Internet as confusing as we did.

My intention with these posts was to help out other people decide if it was worth their money (and time) to buy the machine and any questions on it will be answered most readily. It seems most of you that reach these pages (hello, you googler) are too shy to ask directly, though . So, in the following weeks, I will be answering the questions olivetalks readers have, according to our Google Wordpress Stats, regarding this machine.

Finally, today’s impressions: 40 minutes on each side. My patience is definitely improving. I slowly but surely found each hair, trimmed it with scissors, and zapped it with the laser in Scan mode at power level 3. After the hour and twenty minutes of labour, quite a few smoky hair-tips and a distinct burning smell in the room. Bad thing of the day: twice I had to stop the scanning because the “pin prick” was more like a full blown ouch feeling. Maybe I got a nerve or more sensitive areas? Good thing of the day: two hairs I definitely knew the location of, have not grown back since I zapped them (one a month ago, the other one last week).

<< previous entry -“Rio Laser Hair Remover” does it work? – continue reading >>

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And so I still believed until more and more examples of the contrary have appeared in my life. We wanted lamps for the house. For my office: a 10-euro-halogen standing lamp. Quite simple, bare, white, metallic… un-fancy. I did not need any more. For the living room, (where people show off their quality??) a 30-euro-halogen standing lamp, with parallel “feet”, covered in a classy dark-brown layer of granulated material, with a top glass plate. I can move my lamp about without much effort and it’s been working without a glitch for over a year now. The expensive lamp has never really stood straight, is a heavy monster and besides making noise, it has shocked me twice already when turning on the light and has made the bulb burst twice (the two events were not related, by the way).

Another example: the static bicycle ZoltarStark mentioned in his The challenge continue post. We spent a whole week comparing prices and the perks you’d get in each price range. We finally went for a more expensive one, with loads of cool stuff. The cool stuff has never worked properly. Sure, we could have returned it, but 1. we decided that a crappy bike was better than no bike; 2. if we had returned it, my present post would not have been as cool, now would it?

Six and a half years ago, when I was off to Ireland to do my PhD, my father bought me a 3000 EUR Acer laptop with 64 MB of RAM and a 9 GB hard-disk. That laptop worked without a glitch for 5 years. It might actually still be working, for all I know. And I say it might because someone “borrowed” it from a hotel in Bogotá over a year ago, and we have not heard from it since… snif. By the way, if that person reads this, could you tell us if it’s still working? We won’t ask for it back, promise! Three years ago I got myself a 1200 EUR DELL laptop with 1 GB of RAM and a 60 GB hard-disk. Allowing for time difference and the drop in laptop’s prices, I had expected my new laptop to be at least as good as the Acer one. My DELL laptop… cannot be called a laptop anymore. Its card reader slot and Ethernet port stopped working a year and a half ago, as the left back-side suffered from overheating. The laptop is placed over 4 tiny dictionaries that hold it 3 cm over the desk to allow air to circulate as the fans struggle to deal with the heat. When you tell it to open a file from Windows Explorer, you can sing Andrea Bocelli’s Vivo per lei three times before it actually responds. Oh, Windows needs to be reinstalled from time to time for it to continue working properly you say? I could reinstall Windows, you say? Yeah… the screen stopped working a year ago. It’s been plugged to an external screen since then and you can only see stuff when it’s already finished booting. I basically have the poor thing running Thunderbird and that’s it. I’m using a, yet another, new laptop which only has Linux installed, in case you wondered what was I typing from.

And finally la crème of this post: the products that prompted me to write this… dissertation on failing products and pocket pains. Last summer we bought a portable DVD player. As with the bike, we researched, we compared prices, we informed ourselves of the options, we blah bla blahed a bit more… and finally went to MediMax and bought the cheapest they had: a Xoro HSD7100 7” portable DVD player for 100 EUR, which according to some pages could, maybe, be convinced to play multiregion DVDs. Not long afterwards we followed the same research path for normal DVD players and instead of getting the cheapest one in the shop, we bought a Phillips DVP5960 DVD player in the mid-price region, looking for better picture quality, sound and whatnot.

Xoro played multiregion DVDs from the start. It also plays.. well, basically anything you throw at it. It is quick to respond, its battery life is almost 3 hours and once you accept portable DVD players do make some noise when playing DVDs, its sound is excellent. My brother bought a DVD player not long ago which cost almost twice the price and it might have a 9” screen and run for longer, but is picky as hell as to what it wants to play.

Phillips takes 10 seconds to respond to the Power on command. And another 5 to open the door, making it quite annoying when you forgot to remove the DVD before powering it off. It makes as much noise, if not more, as Xoro (which is NOT normal for DVD players). The remote is more temperamental than a Chihuahua after being stuck in a box for the duration of a transatlantic flight. And if it improves the image quality, well, you’d have to have better eyesight than Superman to notice it. It does play multiregion DVD, after you introduce a code, though…

Conclusion to all this rambling… buy pretty things, for there is no guarantee in quality anymore, and save to be able to replace your purchases in case you did not stumble by chance on a good product.

PS. El Xorro wins of course!

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In the professional salon I went to, the price per session for half a back was 180 EUR and it took around 20 minutes.

I paid around 350 EUR for the Rio Salon Laser Hair Remover. That means it cost me the same as two sessions of laser treatment on an area as big as half a back. I am treating far smaller areas. If you have read my previous posts, you will know my test areas are two 8 x 8 cm² areas (the bikini line) and two armpits 2 x 10 cm² each. Adding them up… about 13 x 13 cm² of skin. It’s easier to visualize if you grab a ruler. I’ve just phoned my friend to see how big his back is to compare and he said that although the area is a lot bigger, what they actually consider when deciding how much to charge you is the density of hair. He reckons for 180 EUR per session he had done less than the amount of hair an average male has in one of his armpits… now there’s an image. So… I think the bikini line plus the armpits surely are equivalent to this friend’s half a back, as far as amount of hair is concerned… Therefore, assuming both methods work (which is still to be seen), doing it at home is a lot cheaper. For the same amount of money you can have two sessions done either at a salon or at home. Any additional sessions at home will therefore be money saved. That’s definitely a plus.

Another friend had her upper lip done. She says it cost her about 25 EUR per session, and they told her she needed about 6 or 7. That’s about half the price of the Rio Salon machine. So if all you ever want to done is your upper lip, then it would be cheaper to go to a salon. Furthermore, I can see how it would be difficult to do the hairs close to the nose by oneself, as the wand of the Rio hair remover would bump against the nose… I’m not going to try. If anybody out there has tried it, I would really appreciate it if you could drop us a note.

So, today is my second laser treatment day for armpits. Shaved, check. Hairs 2-3 millimeter long, check. Rio Scan Laser Hair Remover connected, in Scan mode and at Power Level 3, check. Ok, here we go then…

45 minutes later…

I was a lot more thorough this time. I think I am getting better at covering all the hairs. You just need loads of patience and… to rest your arms in the middle. Ouch, they are a bit sore from holding them against a mirror so I could see where to aim better.

So now I’ve done the bikini line three times and the armpits twice, I’m already saving money! But I do think I am spending twice the time it would take in a salon As always, time versus money. More in two weeks, with the bikini line day 4. Thanks for passing by!

<< previous entry -“Rio Laser Hair Remover” does it work? – continue reading >>

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