Is laser hair removal right for you?

The honest version, before you spend anything.

Laser hair removal isn’t right for everyone, and a fair few clinics won’t tell you that until you’ve paid. Here is everything that affects whether we can treat you, written out in full.

None of this replaces your patch test. We will go through all of it with you properly, and some of it needs a conversation rather than a rule. But if something below applies to you, it’s better to know now.

If you’re not sure, ring us on 07398 896462. We’d far rather spend ten minutes on the phone than have you book, travel in and find out at the door.

What affects whether we can treat you

The laser finds the pigment in your hair and turns that light into heat, which damages the follicle. No pigment, nothing to target. Ginger, grey and blonde hair don’t respond, particularly when the hair is lighter than the skin around it. Dark hair responds best, and coarse dark hair responds fastest.

Any tan changes how the laser reads your skin, so we don’t treat over one. That includes fake tan, gradual tanners and tanning pills, not just real sun and sunbeds. Leave four weeks after sun exposure and two weeks after fake tan, and please do not top the tan up part-way through a course.

You’re very welcome. What changes is the goal: because the hair growth is driven by hormones, the treatment is about managing growth rather than removing it altogether. Expect to keep coming back for maintenance. We’ll be straight with you about that from the first session. 

See more on PCOS.

Anything marketed for hair, skin and nails is working directly against what we’re doing. Stop taking them at least three months before you start, and stay off them for the duration, or you’ll pay for sessions that are fighting your own supplement cupboard.

If you’ve had a prescribed course, we wait two weeks after it finishes. If you’ve taken steroids for aesthetic or performance reasons, we cannot treat you. They thin the skin, and thin skin plus laser is how burns happen.

We treat clients who have had cancer five years or more after treatment, with written sign-off from your doctor, and we restrict the area we work on relative to where the cancer was. Someone treated for breast cancer, for example, would be treated below the navel only. If you have had skin cancer, we can’t treat you at all.

We don’t carry out laser hair removal on clients with Type 1 diabetes. It’s a healing and sensation question rather than anything to do with the laser itself, and it’s the one we get asked to bend most often. We don’t.

We do not treat during pregnancy or while breastfeeding. Not because it is proven unsafe, but because it is not proven safe, and pregnancy hormones make the results unpredictable anyway. Come back to us afterwards.

Some antibiotics, isotretinoin and a number of other medicines make your skin react to light far more than it normally would. Bring the name of anything you’re taking to your patch test, including anything you’ve started since we last saw you.

Tell us at your patch test. It doesn’t automatically rule you out, but we need to know before we start.

The laser cannot go over a tattoo, because the ink absorbs the energy and it burns. We work around tattoos and moles, so tell us where they are before we begin.

If you get cold sores near the area we’re treating, mention it. Treating over an active outbreak isn’t something we’ll do, and there are steps worth taking beforehand.

One thing about freckles.

If you have freckles in the area we’re treating, they may change. Some go lighter or disappear altogether. Some go darker. Both are normal responses, neither is a burn, and we can’t tell you in advance which way yours will go.

If that matters to you, and for some people it very much does, say so at your patch test and we will talk it through before we start.
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