Hair Today...

TRIA Personal Laser hair removal system is a hand-held, cordless and rechargeable laser for home-use, designed for all those long-suffering men and women out there who fuss on a daily basis about their body hair and who just need a break.

Whilst planning in all earnest to be my usual sceptical self about trialling a product that claims to rid me long-term of body hair, I’ve given it a shot, and blow-me-down, it does actually seem to have worked! Here’s how:

The handling of this product is very straight-forward, and for those of you who are as adverse to reading instructions as me (I didn’t bother or need to), it is highly user-friendly: simply hold the laser flat against your skin so all three of its contact sensors are depressed and the glass ‘output’ window is covering your skin, set the intensity, one of three levels, and away you go.

Pulses of light occur at one second intervals, so just wait for the red light, followed by a ‘bleep’ to confirm its success. If the laser hasn’t worked, it gives out a different bleep, more of a TV game show ‘wrong answer’ kind of bleep.

As the laser works by converting light energy into thermal energy and targeting the hair’s melanin, subsequently ejecting the hair after disabling the follicle, this translates into you feeling a mild pinch of heat on the treated area.

This I found to be perfectly tolerable and not a patch on the discomfort of other forms of hair removal such as epilation or electrolysis (ouch), both of which I have previously paid good money to suffer.

There really is not much else to say about the process itself, you just keep moving the laser across the skin, with the only problem being that it’s a bit boring, like a lot of beautifying treatments.

At times, the laser did seem a little fickle and appeared to work more consistently on flatter bodily surfaces like the side of my leg, and gave me fewer ‘wrong answer’ bleeps as a result, but I suspect this is owing to the ergonomics of the flat ‘output’ window.