The average human is born with about 5 million hair follicles on their body, only a tiny fraction of which are on the head (about 100,000-150,000). While you certainly don’t want to strip yourself of every last hair, there are some places where you’d probably rather hair weren’t a part of the landscape.
At Balboa Medical Center & Spa in Encino, California, Dr. Amir Raeesy offers the latest services to help you achieve your body goals. If you’re engaged in a never-ending battle against unwanted body hair, we can help with a long-lasting solution — laser hair removal.
And if you start now, you can enjoy silky smooth skin by summer.
Clearing the way with a laser
To banish your unwanted body hair, we use the state-of-the-art Cynosure® Icon™ laser system, The Icon delivers pulses of light energy into the pigment in your hair follicles. Your pigment cells, by their very nature, are designed to absorb incoming heat.
In this case, our laser delivers enough energy so that when these cells absorb the light pulses, it heats them and damages them to the point where they’re unable to produce any more hair.
Among the benefits to our laser system is that we’re able to precisely control the energy we deliver, which means we can accurately target your hair follicles without damaging the surface of your skin or neighboring tissue underneath.
In fact, our laser energy is safe enough to use almost anywhere you have unwanted body hair, including your:
- Upper lip
- Face
- Underarms
- Neck
- Bikini line
- Back
- Chest
- Legs
The only place we don’t use our laser is around your eyes.
The smooth path forward
The reason to start now is that laser hair removal takes a little time to completely address your entire target areas. At any given time, each of your hair follicles is in one of three stages:
- Anagen, or the active growth phase
- Catagen, or the transitional phase
- Telogen, or the resting stage
While a majority of your hair follicles are in the active growth stage — around 90% — some may be in either of the other two stages.
So when we set to work treating an area of your body, we tackle the hair follicles that are readily visible. Then we wait a few weeks before your next appointment to allow time for other hair follicles to make themselves known.
Through the course of several treatments (most of our clients need three to seven), we ensure that we address all of the follicles in your target area.
Doing your part
To help us do our job better, we ask that you do just a couple of things before we get started on your laser hair removal. First, don’t wax your hair or use any other hair removal method that takes your hair out by the root. You can still shave since that only breaks the hair off at the shaft.
We also ask that you steer clear of tanning. For us to give you the best coverage possible, we need to readily identify your hair follicles, and it’s far easier to do so on a lighter backdrop. That said, if you have a darker complexion, we’re still able to remove your hair, but it may take a few more sweeps to get the job done right.
If you’d like to get started so that you can greet summer with nothing but your skin, schedule an appointment with Balboa Medical Center & Spa by calling our office at (818) 701-0017 or requesting an appointment online today.
* Individual results may vary