Laser hair removal can give you back hours of your life by removing hair from problem areas permanently. In this post, we discuss this popular procedure, explain why different types of lasers are better for different skin types, and help you discover the areas of your body where you can use laser hair removal.
At New Image Medical Spa in Fremont, California, Dr. Surinder Sandhu helps women and men remove unwanted body hair. She has two laser hair removal systems — the Alexandrite laser (best for lighter-skinned patients) and the Nd:YAG laser (best for darker-skinned patients) — to give all of her clients the best possible experience.
Before we get to the list of popular areas of your body where you can use laser hair removal, it’s a good idea to understand how your body hair grows. There are three stages of human hair growth and shedding.
This is the active growth phase of your hair. When a new hair forms, it pushes up and out through the follicle. This phase lasts about 2-6 years for scalp hair (so it can grow quite long), and about a month for body hair (which explains why these hairs are shorter). Around 90% of your hairs are somewhere in this process at any given time.
Catagen is the transitional phase when growth stops and the blood flow to the follicle is cut off. At any given time, around 3% of your hairs are in this phase, which lasts for about 2-3 weeks.
Telogen is the resting phase, during which a hard bulb of keratin forms at the root of your hair and holds it in place. Around 6%-8% of your hairs are in this phase at any time, and it lasts 100 days for scalp hairs and longer for hair on the rest of your body. You shed up to several hundred hairs in the telogen phase every day all over.
A hair removal laser sends tiny pulses of light at a specific wavelength right at your hair follicles. The light turns to heat when it hits the melanin in the hair. This causes microdamage, which doesn’t cause a burn or scar but which alters the hair follicle just enough that it doesn’t grow new hairs.
This only affects hair follicles in certain ranges of the anagen phase, so you need multiple laser treatments spaced a few months apart to treat all of your hair follicles in a certain area. The good news is that after you're done, you won’t need to use hair removal techniques for quite a while. With repeated treatments, you may make the damage to the hair follicles permanent.
You can use laser hair removal on almost any part of your body safely. These six areas are most often targeted:
To learn more about laser hair removal, or to get your sessions started, contact New Image Medical Spa at 510-269-2960 or book your appointment online today.
