Shedding usually starts 5-30 days post treatment and may appear as new hair growth, which is actually just damaged hairs pushing their way out of their follicles. It typically lasts 2 – 3.5 weeks but can be speeded up with regular exfoliating sessions.
Shedding can be seen as a positive indicator of successful treatments, since LHR targets pigment in your hair & damages its follicle.
Damage to the Hair Follicle
Hair removal lasers work by sending heat into a hair follicle and burning it, thus disabling it and stopping future hair growth. Unfortunately, however, the heat also damages nearby skin layers causing redness and inflammation resulting in discomfort after your treatment session has concluded. This explains why your treatment area may become sore afterwards.
After 5-30 days after treatment, dead hair will begin to shed from damaged follicles. Although it may look like stubble, this is actually dead hair coming out. To accelerate this process you can wash with a loofah or gentle washcloth, exfoliate frequently and avoid sunlight exposure on the area being treated.
Avoiding tweezing, waxing, picking or threading the area as this can irritate both skin and remove non-anagen hairs that were present at the time of treatment. This may result in gaps appearing in your hair growth pattern.
Damage to the Skin
Laser treatments cause damage to hair follicles during their anagen phase, where hair follicles receive a healthy blood supply. When laser damage causes damage to these follicles, hair moves into its catagen phase where it shrinks and detaches from its blood supply; this signals to your body that its no longer necessary and sheds it naturally within 5-30 days after treatment as stubble. Exfoliation may help speed this process along by eliminating dead skin holding hairs in place as well as encouraging your follicles’s rapid cycle more quickly thereby increasing its success thereby increasing success of treatments overall.
