Personal Laser Hair Removal System
Recently the FDA cleared the first hair-removal laser for home use, designed to reduce hair growth significantly. The Tria, which can only be used below the neck and costs $995, comes with a safety sensor—if it’s aimed at dark or tanned skin, the device locks to prevent the risk of burns.
This machine uses a diode laser to target unwanted hair—but at half the strength. Dark pigment in the hair shaft acts like a tiny antenna, taking the laser’s energy and shooting the heat down into the follicle, explains Bob Grove, cofounder, president, and CEO of Tria Beauty. All hair has a growth cycle—active, falling out, or dormant—controlled by cells in the follicle. When the follicle is in the growing phase, the sudden increase in temperature disrupts this process, causing a long delay before it grows another hair—which will be thinner and lighter—or shutting it down completely. In a doctor’s office, the lasers are strong enough to stop hair growth in active follicles more often. The lower-energy Tria can cause the permanent death of a hair follicle, but thinner, lighter hairs are more likely because the laser uses less energy. Company-sponsored clinical research, published last year in Lasers in Surgery and Medicine, reported hair reduction of 70 percent after the second treatment (with each session spaced three weeks apart). After a year of monthly use, overall hair reduction was about 67 percent of what it was at the start. (That compares with about 80 percent with lasers used in the doctor’s office.)
A second major player in home hair removal was approved by the FDA this year, it is Silk’n. This device is using pulsed light, which, like a diode laser, causes heat injury to the hair’s root, but it achieves this with several different wavelengths of light. It will be sold only at doctors’ offices for $800, and in clinical studies, testers reported an average reduction of 40 to 75 percent in hair growth after three treatments spaced two weeks apart and measured three months after the last treatment.
Source: Allure
