Mike Murphy's Blog

I don’t usually write this sort of thing, but I feel I must…

In the last few years I have heard consistent stories about some salons/clinics in the UK offering deals on laser hair removal, with very poor, or non-existent, clinical results. One of my daughter’s friends experienced this recently.

These centres appear to be legit, bone-fide laser centres with apparently good equipment. However, I keep hearing about customers who complete their full course of treatment sessions, and see little, to no, results. They also tell me that they feel ‘no pain’ even though no skin surface cooling, of any kind, is applied.

This is a clear and obvious indicator that insufficient energy is being applied to the skin – laser/IPL hair removal is painful if no cooling is used. It has to be!! Thermal pain receptors in the dermis trigger at 45ºC; to achieve any kind of reasonable result in hair removal, a temperature of at least 70ºC must be attained in the follicle.

So, without skin surface cooling, pain is inevitable when the laser/IPL energy is applied properly.

What is going on?

It’s obvious to me that these centres are not carrying out the treatments correctly. There are two potential reasons for this, as I see it:

1. The staff are poorly trained and don’t know the correct set of parameters to apply;
2. The centres are deliberately applying sub-threshold parameters knowing that their customers will need to return, and spend more money, many more times than they really need to.

In either case, this is not good. My daughter’s friend asked me about her treatment. She had had more than 20 sessions on her underarm areas. I pointed out that a properly used protocol should have removed most of her hair in less than ten repeat sessions. She said that she had seen little difference in her hair volume.

I suggested she ask her laser operator what fluence she was using – the operator had no idea what she was talking about!!

This is very serious. It undermines and discredits the entire industry and rips people off. It also steals customers from honest laser/IPL operators trying to make a living.

These con artists need to be exposed, and need to be shut down.

Perhaps ‘Trading Standards’ can assist in this…

Ciao for now,

Mike.