If you have dark hair and light skin, laser is a great option for hair reduction, and it can be a cost and pain effective way to reduce how much electrolysis you will require after. For this reason, it’s fairly typical for people who make good candidates for laser to do laser first, then follow-up with electrolysis.

I personally find electrolysis more painful and harder to tolerate for various reasons. With laser, a whole area is treated at once and the hair falls out in a cycle. It doesn’t take much time for the laser to zap you, and I can be in and out of a laser session in 20 - 30 minutes.

With electrolysis, you pay by hour and they go hair-by-hair, so it takes a very long time for a small area to be treated, and you have to come back regularly to try to clear an area. For example, you might have an hour of electrolysis once a week. Not only does this make it more expensive, it also means you have to withstand a much longer exposure to pain, where laser might be 10 - 20 minutes of pain once every 5 weeks, electrolysis means pain for an hour once a week.

So I endorse taking the laser-first approach. They’re both very painful in my experience, and I really struggled to cope with the pain (despite consistent feedback that I have a high pain tolerance by hospital staff and physical therapists over the years).

Even after 20+ laser sessions I still have facial hair, though now the hair is sparse enough I can shave with one of those portable electric face shavers marketed to women. I continue to need laser sessions, I actually need to schedule one because I’ve missed some treatments.

At some point I will finally switch to electrolysis, once the laser techs think they can’t do anything more for me.

Light skin; dark blonde here. My facial hair is darker than anywhere else. Six sessions at high power were enough to clear my cheeks and most of my neck of visible hairs, and significantly thin out around my mouth. I have quite a few gray hairs that will need electrolysis to clear, and I plan to take care of the rest that way too.

What is your skin and hair colour? My hair is dark brown and I’m white, so laser got nearly all of my facial hair save for some more orange ones. On the other hand my partner is ginger and it did almost nothing.

I would recommend getting a reasonable number of sessions to clear whatever you can (you should be able to see progress after 5 or so sessions) before even considering electrolysis. I paid about AUD$50 or so for each laser session, compared to AUD$300 for electrolysis (which works out to about $4 per hair removed), so it is far more cost effective to keep throwing laser at your hair until you’ve just got the most stubborn ones left.

it depends, i had relatively pale skin and dark hair and i had maybe two-four months of sessions back in 2018 or 2019 (before my ffs) and it worked pretty good; still have a little bit on my chin but literally it’s nothing serious and you can’t even notice it, it’s just my own personal disphoria and i just run a razor on it every month or so.

the middle of the face when they do it hurts so much even with numbing cream so be prepared. it’s over quickly so just let them go for it and grin and bare it T_T

i’m trying to remember how much it was because it was so long ago but i want to say like maybe between 80 and 200 a session?

Thanks everyone. I am hopeful that between laser hair removal and electrolysis, I should be able to clear most of not all of my facial hair

I’ve got dark hair and white skin, and it took about a dozen or so treatments, and I’d say it got rid of 99.9% of my hair permanently. However, experience tells me most people don’t get that level of effectiveness.

I have dark brown hair and pale skin; a year or two of lasers dropped me down from “shaving twice a week” to “shaving once a month”. You still get a bit of fluff, but it’s pretty pale. One or two stubborn darker hairs, but much less noticeable.

Facial hair is incredibly stubborn. I’ve had three sessions so far and a lot has disappeared. But there’s still a lot visible as well but quite patchy. Upper lip and chin are the worst. Like you, I have dark hair and a (very) pale skin.
I do take some solace is seeing less and less hair in my shaver as weeks go by. It is working, but slowly.

The lady at the clinic was honest upfront that she didn’t have a lot of experience with a full removal of facial hair. Most customers for facial hair removal are men who want their beards trimmed.

Highly effective, can only recommend. It depends on your hair colour how many sessions you’ll need.

Up front I seemed like an appropriate candidate, light-ish skin and dark-ish hair. The tech seemed to think it’d work. However, six full face sessions did absolutely nothing, not a single thing. It turned out there’s a bit of red pigment in there that’s not super noticeable but is enough to prevent laser from working. So, your mileage may vary, but fingers crossed and good luck!!

The lighter your skin and darker your hair, the more effective it will be. It could be, that the contrast is too small, in which case you need a different method.

I’m also curious about people’s experiences when it works - I already had 1 treatment on my underarms and it thinned it out a lot. My sister had 5 or 6 sessions for her underarms and it’s been all gone for years. Considering my decently light olive complexion and dark hair seems to be a good candidate, I’m wondering if I should do other areas but I still fear getting it done on my face and being stuck with a patchy mess if I stop being able to afford it. I rely on looking half decent unshaven to be able to not shave for a week every week and not care so if I had to start shaving every couple days that would suck.

I had zero effect, having ginger facial hair seems to have hindered it a lot, but I should also try other places