Teddy

From my understanding, you have to be fairly religious so to speak about zapping yourself in a regular schedule for an IPL to be ‘somewhat’ effective.

My understanding of an IPL that I studied about four years ago is that hair grows in three distinct cycles. This is from memory, so please bear with me.

In order for (a hair) to be successfully removed, it has to be zapped during its growth phase. I think there is a growth, dormant & terminal phase for the lifecycle of a hair.

From what I remember, they recommend you zap yourself every two weeks. My manufacture said theirs permanently worked after three cycles, or a month and a half, with the prerequisite disclaimer that more time might be needed. Since you have millions of hairs, it’s a given that all of them are in a different phase of growth at any given time.

So that’s another reason why you have to be diligent about the every two week schedule for months at a time. And it is definitely an investment of your time, seeing how full body sessions for me were 3-4 hours at a time.

I zapped my whole body over a period of several months. My unit has to be held completely flat against the skin or else it will miss-fire. From the reaching, holding a certain angle for the recharge & power-up phase of the unit for several hours will wear you out and cramp your hand. After 3-4 full body sessions, this gets to be a royal pain in the butt.

I’m 60 y/o now and my body hair (was) fairly dark. Back then when I was using it, I was in PM and not taking enough AA to dampen DHT, so I pretty much had thick dark leg hairs. I’m a dark completed Caucasian male. Now that I’ve been on HRT for 2.5 years, my body hair has been diminished.

I was on micronized progesterone the last two years, but since dropping it two months ago, I’ve noticed body hair regrowing. It’s not bad and I’ve started taking Red Reishi Mushroom which has greatly helped. I’m mainly noticing it growing on both sides of my calves, to the left & right of my shins.

I zapped every square inch of my body below the ears. My chest, underarms and belly have been permanently removed. I’d say that 90%+ of my leg hairs are gone. My forearms still have some hair, but they’re almost invisible.

IPL’s are not recommended for the male face. Did I listen? Of course not lol. Let my experience be a warning. The warnings I read said you’d end up with splotchy results. While the IPL had practically no effect on my beard, about half my mustache is gone. If I don’t shave for a few days at a time, the regrowth looks terrible. It’s definitely splotchy. I mean it just looks weird.

Another thing about using it on your face ... while I could take the top level five anywhere on my body, I could barely tolerate level two on myface. It hurt like a mother_____.

I will say that when I did use it on myface, that the regrowth period was several days. It seemed more than anything that it stunned the hairs, haha, and my face was baby smooth for about three days. When mybeard started growing again, it seemed like it grew back at triple speed, which was weird.

I will say that mybeard is my biggest area of concern. It gives me more dysphoria than anything else. I can’t stand it. Every day I detest it more and more. While I still hope for bigger boobs, I’m hoping to get laser on myface one day soon.

Back when I was using the IPL regularly, I spent a majority of the time zapping my pubic area. Sometimes I’d hit it 4-5 times a session, with sessions every single week for about 3-4 months. I wanted to make damn sure that I killed every hair. As it turned out, they pretty much all grew back.

As far as a ratings system goes, there seems to be numerous “best of” pages online. It seems their real purpose is the accompanying advertising that populates their page. This could be true for anything you buy online. So many of these ratings pages just pull from the best rated units off Amazon. I don’t think there is an actual consumer reports rating system for IPL inits. All the ones I saw were just a listing of the top products available.

The way I did it on all these review pages was just to dive into each product sold and compare them myself. Most of these review pages would list the same units over and over. While they might all list ten different units, you can pretty much narrow them down yourself to the top 3-4 units.

At the time when I bought mine, the Luma Rx IPL Pro was rated at 100,000 flash power rating. That was far and above any other unit sold. The flash head is 4mm, meaning it covers more real estate so to speak, and no other product being sold at the time had a head as big as the Luma Rx. From a search I did last week, mine is no longer available.

I don’t know if anything compares to that today, but when I bought mine in December of 2018, this was the best on the market at 100K flash rating and a 4mm head.

I do not believe they ranked the actual power or the power source as is done with boutique salon lasers. I’m unsure if this is a rating that is compared now.

My unit purchased off of Amazon was made in China and cost me $495 at the time. Apparently the best in class was reflected in its price. For what it’s worth, when my purchased was delivered, it was defective. It didn’t work. I had to send it back and they sent me another one, and it’s still working today.

One thing I don’t like about mine is while they advertise a 100K flash capability, the counter on the unit only counts for that particular session and then it resets. I have no idea how many flashes I’ve used in its lifetime. I used 200 the other day and when I plug it in again it’ll be set to zero.

I apologize for the long post, but I wanted to give you the details of my experience. YMMV.

-S