Re: Laser Hair Removal
Going for Laser treatment:
Get out the Golden Pages and make a list of all the beauty salons and cosmetic clinics which offer laser hair removal. Ring each up and ask for a consultation and a patch test. Any reputable place will be happy to offer you a free consultation and a patch test.
The consultation is to establish what you want to achieve and whether it's likely you can achieve it. Laser hair removal works best on coarse, dark hair on pale skin - it's therefore suitable for facial hair, underarm hair, chest/nipple strays, bikini line or suchlike on dark-haired, fish-belly white Irishwomen, but not for removing light-coloured hair or for removing any hair at all from darker skins, so anyone who promises you anything different is not to be believed. For the patch test, you proffer a hairy bit of yourself and let them zap a square inch or so of it; you then wait ten days to a fortnight and see if the hair falls out. Get this done in a few clinics (noting which patch of skin was zapped by each clinic - it's easy to forget!) and make a decision based on:
1. The effectiveness of the treatment. Some clinics use outdated or ineffective machinery, so you may see no hair loss at all from some patches.
2. The clinic policy and procedures. Do they listen to what you want, do they promise unlikely results, do they try to sign you up to a specific number of treatments? This last one is unwise - an experienced practitioner will tell you upfront that s/he doesn't know exactly how many treatments it may take to finally remove the hairs. There's no need to commit yourself for a whole course - you could sign up for treatment in a Dublin clinic even if you're only in town a few times a year. You can also hop between clinics.
3. The price. This is unrelated, in my experience, to the quality of the treatment you get.
Laser V Electrolysis:
I wish I'd tried laser treatment before trying electrolysis, which I found mostly ineffective. Several sessions of electrolysis resulted only in dark hairs becoming lighter, but not finer, shorter or absent, while a single session of laser killed some doozies off forever. That was about two years ago and the culprits have never re-appeared.
Electrolysis hurts and if the current is too high, the treated hair pore gets inflamed and you get a spot for every hair treated. Laser hurts like bejaysus if it's in a sensitive area, e.g. upper lip, but only for a moment and the skin is not pierced, so your skin doesn't usually suffer in any visible way. Electrolysis also hurts per hair, as they are treated indiviually, whereas laser treats a patch about 2cm by 1cm at a time, so at least it doesn't hurt as often!
