A fair number of my followers know that I'm about to open an electrolysis practice. I need to make a website at some point, but until then, this thread will have to do. 1/

I've mentioned that about ten years ago, I had some initial work done by Susan Laird, who at the time was up in the Bay Area. Her work was flawless. At the time, Susan was probably the only working electrologist who regularly used the galvanic modality. 2/

Pretty much every electrologist then, and 95% of them now, use thermolysis (or the blend, which I'll discuss later). Thermolysis has a reputation of being very fast. You can do an initial clearance of a heavy upper lip in, say, an hour or so. 3/

Simply put, thermolysis destroys the hair by microwaving the follicle and germ cells (using radiowaves instead of microwaves, but the principle is the same). It also requires extremely accurate insertions, such that the tip of the probe is right next to the follicular bulb. 4/

If you're inaccurate, your small blast zone of thermal damage misses most of the germ cells, and the hair regrows. You're essentially paying for a slow and painful tweeze-job. I've met people who have been battling with hair for a decade, when it should take under 2 years! 5/

Some operators compensate by turning up the power, making a huge heating pattern! The following is what can happen. 6/

Here's a cis woman with mild hirsutism -- excessive hair growth caused by an excess of androgens that result in male-pattern hair growth. The scar tissue formed at the tip of the thermolysis probe has contracted, leaving her covered in ice-pick scars. 7/

Here's a relatively mild case pulled from Susan's website. This actually looks similar to my own scarring. You can see a faint marbled whiteness where the scar tissue has formed. 8/

A more severe case from Susan's archives. 9/

Here's a trans woman, mid-30s, who had her face stripped with thermolysis under anesthesia several times. She had this work done in the late 90s or early 2000s, when clear-cutting with flash thermolysis was common. Her skin slowly began to cave in due to scar contracture. 10/

Older texts, such as Hinkel's staple "Electrolysis, Thermolysis, and the Blend", warn against using flash thermolysis on coarse beard hair. This is why.

Hinkel was recently removed from the California licensing curriculum. 11/

I use galvanic electrolysis. Simply put, an electrochemical reaction at the probe fills the follicle with sodium hydroxide, a caustic substance that dissolves the root and the germ cells. For the chemists reading, I turn your body into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloralkali_process 12/

It's a slow process. Medium hairs can be removed in about 5 to 6 seconds. Deep beard hairs, like those on the neck and under the chin, might take 15 seconds. It's also extremely difficult to scar with galvanic electrolysis... 13/

But not impossible. We typically measure the amount of sodium hydroxide produced with a unit unique to the field, UL (unit of lye).

1 UL = 0.1 mA * 1 sec

A fine vellus hair might need 15 UL. A coarse chin hair, 90 UL. 14/

In my experience, talking with a few practicing galvanic electrologists out there, many of them are using 250 UL to 350 UL. This happened to me about a year ago, and as a result, I have these white pebbly scars that trace the outline of my beard. 15/

These scars put me a depressive shut-in for about six months. I still get severe panic attacks when I think about them. People ask me why I'm "wasting my time" learning electrolysis. It's because only a few people in the country know what they're doing. 16/

(Those few people are all trans women who left or were forced out of their engineering careers. Go figure.) 17/

OK, let's talk laser! Laser is fast, and everyone's doing it!

I will never let a hair-removal laser anywhere near my face, despite being a "perfect candidate". 18/

I see a lot of laser victims come into the student clinic. Cis women, typically Fitzpatrick 3 (Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Armenian) who wanted vellus hair gone, only to have it turn to thick, terminal hairs. (Look up paradoxical laser stimulation.) 19/

Trans women with beard shadows like this. Realize that the hair isn't manually removed from the skin after a laser treatment. The theory is that your skin will eventually push all of the debris out. I've seen a lot of t-girls now who have been living with this for years. 20/

Here's someone on Susan's Place (no relation to Susan Laird) talking about this: 21/

As an electrologist in California, I'm not allowed to break the skin to dig these things out. I do anyways. Here's a cool one that Susan got. 22/

Some of my regulars at the clinic are shocked when I finally remove shit that's been under their skin for years, in some cases fragments of hair that are a centimeter long! 23/

This is particularly common with thermolysis. The thermal damage can cause the follicle to twist and distort, and the regrowth, instead of growing out of the skin, will corkscrew and burrow in deeper! 24/

Susan is extremely difficult to find now. She's almost 80 and is fed up with the trans community. She used to gently discourage me from entering the field because -- and I'm paraphrasing -- Do you want your job to be dealing with a bunch of trannies? You know how we are. 25/

Hopefully she makes it back to the Palm Springs / Joshua Tree area. Until then, she's holed up in Wyoming. Here's her website: 26/

http://www.hairzapper.com 

If you're in the Bay Area, Christy P also knows what she's doing, and I recommend her highly. She takes insurance. 27/ https://electro-christy.business.site/ 

Any questions? Want work done in LA? Need recommendations for scar revision? DM me. 28/28

Oh, I forgot the other thing about laser. Damn does it fuck up your hairs. I usually put a little tension on the hair I'm killing, and I let it gradually slide out as the follicle slowly dissolves.

Lasered hairs have lost their tensile strength, and as a result they tend to snap apart when I play with them, with the remnant burrowing under the skin. It takes me way longer -- I'd estimate about three times as long -- to remove lasered hair than virgin hair.