There are common areas most seek treatment on such as the legs, arms, back, and bikini line. Sometimes, however, hair ends up in not so common places, and it is still very much unwanted. Laser hair removal can take care of the atypical places just as well, and is available on any part of your body.

The first step in your hair treatment process is finding a reputable location you’re comfortable with dealing with. It is especially helpful if you can feel relaxed during your appointments, so be sure to find the best place for you. Your technician will determine your skin level on the Fitzpatrick scale. This is used to determine what type of laser will suit your skin best, as there are several commonly used in the laser hair treatment process. Both the texture of hair and targeted location are important as well in determining the optimal technology for you.

Nd:Yag is a laser generally used on patients with a darker skin type. If your skin is a darker tone, it is important to be sure your treatment will be done while providing less of a risk to damaging your skin. The Diode Laser is quite common, and specializes on rougher hair and smaller target areas. Intense Pulsed Light is perhaps the most common, and uses flashes of light to damage the hair follicle to prevent it from growing back.

Any of these procedures will be carried out over a time span of 6 to 8 sessions. Allowing 4-8 weeks between each appointment is important as well, so dormant follicles can grow in to be targeted at your next session. Over time, the hair growing in will become less and less dense, until it eventually stops. Once your laser hair treatment process is complete, your skin will be left feeling sleek and flawless on a permanent basis.

It sounds funny that the same technology is used for making the hair grow as well as for removing unwanted hair for good, but this is the beauty of laser hair treatments: the results depend on a few parameters, such as the laser wavelength.

This article will try to explain to you the differences between the two types of laser hair treatment:

Laser Hair Treatment For Hair Removal

Some 20 years ago, a handful of scientists were attempting the first experiments with laser epilation. It took them some 10 years of tests, until the first laser hair treatment for hair removal became available to the public. The technology was called IPL, or Intense Pulse Light, which in fact was not based on a real laser, but rather on the Xenon flash lamps radiation, which was coined as phototricholysis.

Laser hair removal treatments work because of a process which is called selective photothermolysis. One of the lasers’ properties is that they can target selectively certain cell types, while leaving the tissues around untouched. As a principle of physics, light is absorbed by dark objects (which explains why wearing dark colored clothes in the sunlight leads to more heating of the body). In laser hair treatment’s case, the dark matter which attracts the light is melanin, the pigment which gives skin its color. Without melanin, our skin and hair would be extremely white, likewise albinos people.

The lasers specialized for hair removal treatments, will target the follicles (the roots of the hairs), damaging only them, and leaving the rest of the skin intact.

Laser Hair Treatment Against Hair Loss

The second type of laser hair treatments is the treatment against hair loss. Researchers are still disputing the causes of baldness, but this didn’t prevent them from developing a few treatments which are FDA approved and which proved to offer results in many alopecia (baldness) cases.

For this kind of hair treatment, low level lasers are used. Put to act directly on the head skin, these lasers produce the “Photo-Biostimulation” of the hair follicles.

Many companies worldwide developed various systems of laser hair rejuvenation treatments. Not all of them are fully approved by medical organisms, nor they are proven to work. Studies are still to be done, in order to prove that laser hair treatments can save a huge number of people from going bald.