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.
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.