The Do's and Don'ts to Know Before Laser Hair Removal

While summertime makes many of us extra vigilant about body hair removal, Texans have warm weather year-round, meaning they never really get a break.

If you’re tired of spending time and energy plucking, shaving, and waxing, you might want to consider laser. In 2024, more than 3.1 million laser skin treatments were performed, including laser hair removal. And this is an increase from just five years ago, when only 827,000 were performed.

At McHugh Plastic Surgery, Dr. Thomas McHugh offers various laser treatments. Over the years, our team has learned a few valuable dos and don’ts about laser hair removal, which we want to share with you here.

Do: Stop other hair removal efforts in advance

One of the best ways to prepare for laser hair removal is to cease your body hair removal efforts in advance, especially if you’re pulling from the follicle, like waxing and plucking.

When we perform laser hair removal, we direct light energy into the hair follicles, where this energy is received as heat. In turn, this therapeutic heat damages the follicle, causing it to eject existing hair and hampering its ability to grow new hair, at least for a time.

So, to provide you with good coverage during your laser hair removal treatments, we need to see where the follicles are, and this is much easier when there’s hair we can follow.

That said, we do not want you to come in with long hair, because it can be tricky to work around with our precision laser. Instead, shave your legs, armpits, or wherever else we’re removing hair, a few days before your treatment. Shaving before your laser hair removal treatment is OK because it only removes hair at the shaft, so we can still spot the follicles.

Don’t: Use a tanning bed

Be mindful about tanning beforehand. For great results, we need to be able to identify and target all of the hair follicles in your treatment area, and a suntan can camouflage them.

Do: Be patient

The laser hair removal process takes time. First, you will likely need to undergo several treatments, and we space them several weeks apart. We do this because, at any given time, your hair is in one of four stages:

1. Anagen — growing phase
2. Catagen — transitional phase
3. Telogen — resting phase
4. Exogen — shedding phase

To make sure we tackle all of your unwanted body hair, we’ll need multiple sessions to catch each hair at the growth stage of its cycle.

If you have more questions about how to prepare for laser hair removal or want to schedule your first appointment, contact our office in The Woodlands, Texas.