Electrolysis will always have its place in the hair removal market but it's a very small place. Technology has given us a method that is much safer, faster and less painful.

The practice of electrolysis is over 100 years old. It works by inserting a very fine needle into each hair follicle and delivering a small electrical current that will damage the dermal papilla. It's very time consuming, invasive and quite painful.

An area with heavy hair growth could take 2-3 hours per treatment and require several years of treatments done once every 1-3 weeks. With laser hair removal, that same size treatment area might take only 30 to 45 minutes and requires only 6 - 10 treatments spread out in 7-10 week cycles. Not only are the treatments faster and fewer, but they are also much less painful.

The only area in which electrolysis has an advantage over laser hair removal is working on gray, white or blonde hair. Laser hair removal only works on pigmented hair, which means dark hair that has a dark root that can absorb the laser's energy. That energy then converts to heat which destroys the live germinative cells in the dermal papilla. Non-pigmented follicles (the gray, white and blonde hair) allow the laser energy to just pass through them harmlessly.

But the majority of the time, laser hair removal is faster, safer, requires fewer treatments, hurts less and is less expensive. So we don't recommend electrolysis unless it's absolutely necessary.