The Origins and Story Behind Laser Hair Removal Treatments

Posted Feb 28, 2009

If waxing, shaving, or tweezing are part of your daily routine then you are one of the billions of people who cope with the non-disease known as "unwanted hair". Hair removal has been done for centuries for both hygienic and cosmetic reasons. One of the biggest complains about hair removal methods is the fact that they are only temporary fixes. Long has their been the desire for something more permanent...

Queue electrolysis, the usage of electric currents to damage and cut down on hair unwanted hair growth. While being an effective hair removal technique, it only diminishes the hair's return over the course of time. O, yeah, it's also painful!

A decade ago technology stepped up to the plate and introduced the first forms of laser hair removal. For those who don't know, a laser is simply a concentrated beam of light energy. The heat, a bi-product of light, served well for hunting down and putting an end to hair growth on a more permanent level than had been seen before. The heat energies from the laser are applied in a special way that kills off hair follicles and their surrounding, contributing environment. The end result is that laser hair removal makes it so that the follicle does not any longer have the ability to grow hair.

When a new breed of ruby laser hit the markets, the concept of laser hair removal leaped forward. You see, the light output from a ruby laser is ideal for hair removal due to the fact that red light is naturally drawn to darker colors. Thus, the darker colored follicle (when compared to your skin's color) acts like a magnet, and takes the brunt of the beam. Think of this phenomenon in the same way you would when picking out a shirt for a hot summer day. Darker colors are hotter than lighter colors in this situation. With this in mind, ruby lasers were developed specifically for the purpose of being used on hair follicles and skin. Based on the aforementioned logic of summer shirt "selective absorption", the results were more consistent on people with dark hair and light skin.

While this was a great tool, folks with darker skin and/or lighter hair didn't gain as much benefit until the next advancement was made. This advancement came in the form of alexandrite laser technology. While still a red laser, alexandrite lasers offered more efficiency. Around the same time, engineers experimented and learned that cooling the skin during treatment minimized any discomfort a patient feels while making it possible to administer longer treatment sessions and avoid side-effects with greater consistency.

As time passed, more focus was placed on experimenting with new frequencies and colors of light. In the late 90's practitioners began using infra-red frequencies, invisible to the human eye, that went beneath the surface of the skin to route the energies to create the desired changes while simultaneously reducing skin-surface related side-effects. As it stands today, these lasers seem to be the bread and butter for the foreseeable future in the world of laser hair removal.