Can You Get Laser Hair Removal Anywhere?

Have you ever considered what a waste of time it is to shave? Week after week, and sometimes even day after day, we have to stop everything and get rid of unwanted hair. Laser hair removal with the Sciton laser at Lux: A Medical Spa in Bluffton, SC allows you to claim back that wasted time. As a bonus, you’ll also finally be free of stubble and razor burn. Best of all, you can use this treatment nearly anywhere on the body where you have unwanted hair.

Can You Get Laser Hair Removal Anywhere?

We have about five million hairs on our bodies, and plenty of them are in places where we would rather they be gone. With laser treatments, you can target hair anywhere except your eyelids. And with the state-of-the-art Sciton laser we use at Lux, it’s easy to reach every angle and area. Laser hair removal is an exciting prospect!

A lot of us might think first about shaving our legs (after all, that’s the biggest body part most women will shave regularly), but there are other popular areas to target, for both women and men. In fact, you might not have thought of all of them!

Legs

This is the obvious spot, but it’s worth thinking about how amazing it would be not to have to take time out of the shower every day to shave your legs. Imagine not only the time you’ll save but how much aggravation you’ll avoid, too.

How many times have you nicked the thin skin around your ankle? How many times have you been 100% certain you got every hair, only to get out into the sun and see all the ones you missed? And how many times have you had to reject a spur-of-the-moment invitation to the beach or the pool because you weren’t shaved and didn’t have time to do it?

Forearms

Here’s an area that many people don’t think about, but if you’re one of those whose forearm hair comes in thicker and darker than you’d like, laser hair treatments can be a lifesaver. Best of all, you can use lasers to simply thin out the hair rather than get rid of it altogether.

Underarms

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to throw on sleeveless shirts without giving them a second thought? To never find yourself doing that inspection and trying to determine if the stubble is short enough that you can get away with it? Or even worse, constantly reminding yourself that you can’t raise your arms? That can all be over with laser treatments, which are very effective in this area.

Bikini and Brazilian

These are some of the most painful areas to wax, which is usually the best method for getting a good look here. While you can shave these areas, you have to be very careful, and the stubble can be very itchy as it regrows. Laser treatments can be used in these areas, too, and you can get the smooth, hair-free skin you want without the pain and inconvenience you don’t.

Face

Did you know that men frequently seek out laser hair removal on their faces? It’s not necessary to remove all the hair unless you want to, either. There are plenty of men who use this method as a way to reduce a thick beard to make shaving easier and less likely to end in razor burn. When the hair isn’t as thick in an area, you don’t have to go over it multiple times with a razor.

For women, too, the face is a popular area, and it’s easy to spot-treat trouble spots like the chin, the upper lip, the sideburns, and any other spot that’s bothering you. Instead of carefully tweezing every stray hair, just get rid of it.

Trunk

Not every man born with lots of body hair is pleased with it, and if you’d like to reduce the amount of hair you have on your stomach, chest, or back–or get smooth skin entirely–laser is the best way to do it. For women, unwanted hair can grow on the breasts, but we can safely treat it with laser removal treatments.

How Laser Hair Removal Works

Laser hair treatments offer what’s known as permanent hair reduction. They use near-infrared laser light, which is absorbed by the pigment in your unwanted hair. Once absorbed, this light energy travels down the hair shaft to the follicle. This damages the follicle so that it can’t regrow hair as it once did.

Damaged follicles may eventually grow hair again, though more slowly and thinly than before. In some cases, the laser energy will actually destroy the follicle so it can’t regrow any hair at all.

Previous generations of laser hair treatments couldn’t be used by people with skin that was too dark or hair that was too light, but today’s Sciton laser can be used on a wide variety of skin tones and most hair colors other than the very lightest. The laser will target the follicles without damaging the cells around them.

How It Compares

Laser treatments might seem like just another option for removing hair; until you compare them with the alternatives. Once you do, it becomes clear why laser hair treatments are so popular.

Shaving

Shaving is perhaps the oldest form of hair removal out there, but because it never actually addresses the root cause of hair growth, it has to be repeated constantly. The average woman wastes a whole 72 days of her life shaving, and the average man only slightly less.

Side Effects and Expenses

We all do it, so shaving doesn’t really seem at first glance to be all that dangerous. And while it’s not life-threatening, of course, it does come with some unwanted side effects. Even a small nick has the potential to become infected, and those nicks give away the fact that you’re shaving at all. For some people, razor burn is a real struggle, and even the most expensive creams and sharpest razors can’t guarantee relief.

And while shaving always seems the least expensive option because it requires so little initial outlay, over a lifetime it turns into possibly the most expensive way to get rid of your hair. If you’re like most people, you’ll spend close to $10,000 over your life on shaving products: and that doesn’t even count the lost time.

Waxing and Plucking

Because waxing and plucking remove the whole hair, they last much longer than shaving. But there are two serious problems with these methods. The first is pain. There’s no way to avoid this–it simply hurts to have your hair ripped right out! With laser treatments, you can have the same smooth skin without all that pain.

The second problem is the inconvenience. You have to allow your hair to grow long enough that you can grab it to pull out. If your hair shows up dramatically against your skin, this means the waiting period can be very inconvenient and may greatly limit your wardrobe choices.

IPL Hair Removal

IPL works much like laser removal. It also uses pulses of light to target the hair pigments and damage the follicle. The big difference, however, is that where lasers use a tight, controlled light, IPL uses a broad-spectrum light that comes with some serious disadvantages.

Poor Focus

A broad spectrum of light can’t travel as far as a tight beam: think about those flashlights that allow you to adjust the beam from narrow to wide. The wide beam allows you to see more of what’s immediately around you, but the narrow beam can light up things much farther away.

The broad beams of the IPL spread out more, which means IPL treatments aren’t as safe for those with a darker skin tone, a tan, or too little difference between the color of their hair and the color of their skin. The light is too spread out and can be attracted to the melanin in the skin.

Poor Effectiveness

Widely spread beams of light are also less effective than tight ones, which deliver more energy to the follicle. This means IPL requires more treatments to get the same effect and is less likely to permanently disable a follicle. In the end, that translates into greater expense: even though laser treatment is usually more expensive than an IPL treatment, it takes fewer sessions to get your final results.

FAQ About Laser Hair Treatments

The Sciton laser is a good option for nearly anyone. Even if you’ve been told in the past that you aren’t a good candidate for IPL or an older laser removal technology, come talk to us about whether we can help. Chances are, we can!

The only thing that could really keep you from getting treatment would be if you have an active skin infection in the target area. In that case, you’ll just need to wait until it clears up.

This is a very individual question, and the answer will depend on your unique skin and hair color combination, how dense your hair is, and whether you want to completely remove the hair or simply thin it out the hair.

All that being said, it usually takes between four and eight treatments. Of course, if your goal is simply to thin out the area, you would usually only need one to three treatments at most.

In most cases, it’s wise to wait at least four weeks between treatments, and for some people, eight weeks is a better time frame. This is because your hair is constantly cycling between the active growing stage and stages of dormancy and shedding.

When your hair is dormant or shedding, it is not connected to the follicle, and thus laser treatments are less effective at damaging the follicle. By waiting a few weeks, you allow more of the hair to go into the active growing stage so it can be effectively targeted.

The advanced laser we use is not painful. Instead of firing all the energy of the laser in one strong pulse, our laser sends multiple lower-energy pulses in rapid succession, which means treatment is not only safe and fast but also very comfortable.

Get Rid of the Hair Today!

If you’re tired of your unwanted hair and ineffective treatments to get rid of it, contact us at Lux: A Medical Spa in Bluffton, SC today. We can’t wait to help you get the effortlessly smooth skin you deserve!!