Mike Murphy's Blog

I heard an interesting story today. One of my trainees has been told by her laser supplier not to use my recommended fluences for hair removal – “they are too high”, they said. “Your laser can’t do that for long periods of time. Mike doesn’t know our machines like we do…” Well, that bit is… Continue reading “Mike doesn’t know our lasers…”

Proteins in cells are typically composed of three animo acid chains, wrapped up tightly around each other. A single cell may contain up to 20 million copies of the same protein, whilst there are around 50,000 different proteins encoded in the human genome. A computer-generated representation of a protein complex (Courtesy of Lucy Colwell/www.pymol.org) In… Continue reading Tissue denaturation triangles – why temperature AND time are both important in laser/IPL treatments

I occasionally see comments such as ‘the target needs to be heated to 70°C to be properly killed’. This is only half the story. As with all cooking, a target may need to be heated to 70°C to be properly cooked, but it must be maintained at that temperature for a certain amount of time… Continue reading Tissue denaturation temperatures and times – how are they related?

Recently, I have been looking further into laser/IPL hair removal. I have learned that we need to attack the follicles when they are in “early anagen”. So, what precisely is “early anagen”? The anagen growth phase in follicles can be broken down into six stages: Anagen I : chemical signals from the DP trigger stem… Continue reading This is weird!!! We don’t need to see the hairs we are treating…

Many diode lasers and IPL systems come with ‘ice cold’ cooling tips these days. They tell us that these will chill the skin to give us ‘pain free’ treatments. The fact is, it’s not true! The cooling systems inside handpieces (usually water cooling and Peltier elements) are designed, by engineers, to keep the handpiece cooled.… Continue reading How good are laser/IPL handpiece cooling tips?

I have seen many reports, though the years, from laser/IPL hair removal techs asking why they see ‘all the hair growing back’ usually after four, five or six sessions. This keeps cropping up, again and again. I was puzzled by this phenomenon so I thought about whether my hair growth model might be able to… Continue reading “My hair has all come back!!” they say. Synchronised hair growth – why does this happen?

I was recently asked about calibration – what is it and why does it matter? It’s really quite simple. When you are driving in your car, or bike, or truck, or aircraft, you may need to know your speed, at any given time. So, you look at the speedometer and it gives you a number.… Continue reading Calibration – how important is this?

I have compiled a bunch of little booklets along with Lisa McMahon. These are freely available online. We are thinking about printing some of these depending if there is a demand. Let us know please.