@noiob yeah, like permanent hair removal or at least thinning it

@Felthry there's Laser and Electrolysis, those are pretty permanent

@noiob yeah but I don't know the first thing about those, hence the question

they're also supposed to be really painful though and we have a pretty low tolerance for pain >.< probably worth it though?

@Felthry yeah in both cases it's an attempt to (semi-)permanently damage the hair follicles, so it's gonna hurt a bit. I haven't tried either, you'll probably find people talking about their experience with it if you search the archives on r/asktransgender or sth

okay to boost your original toot?

@noiob it is, yeah, thank you

@Felthry @noiob 👋

We've had quite a lot of laser, feel free to ask us anything you wanna know?

@pastelbat The top question right now is, how to do it on a very tight budget

after rent and groceries we have like $50 a month to work with

@Felthry that is going to be a tricky bit. They're both pretty expensive.

For comparison (and this is UK, so ymmv) our full beard area of face/neck laser sessions cost £80 a session, and we have it every 6 weeks. That's not "forever" but I think I'm at about 7 sessions now, with hair not 'gone' but significantly reduced (and 6 about 8 years ago).

I think your best bet is going to be getting one of the online group discount things;- When we were looking at laser for our legs a couple of years back we looked into that, and there were some deals on Groupon that reduced the cost by a big amount.

@packbat yeah

@coda what do you do for it? It's not something you can do at home, right? Is it expensive? Is it as painful as we've heard it is?

@Felthry i had to go to a clinic to get it done by a doctor (there happens to be one near my house). It cost something on the order of like $400 total for the 5 sessions i did; i don’t remember exactly

@coda blrf, that's a bit more than I'd like.... not sure we can afford that easily

@coda and it'll probably be even more expensive because we want to get rid of a lot of body hair too, not just facial

@Felthry it’s definitely possible, yeah :(

@coda someone else said they paid £2k for six full-body sessions :<

@Felthry also re: pain - laser is more tolerable than electrolysis as far as I’m aware. I have not done electrolysis though.

When you get laser, they cover the area with a numbing gel, and then press a handheld device to your skin, and momentarily activate the laser, which stings a little, but isn’t long-lasting or unbearable. They do this a bunch of times in different areas, until they’ve managed to get coverage on the entire area you want it done to

@porsupah Unfortunately for us, that's far more than we can afford >.<

What is IPL, and what makes it worse?

@Felthry Intense Pulsed Light - more like a controlled flash, so the spectrum's much broader than a laser's. Winds up working, but not as effectively. Both rely on light skin and dark hairs - dark skin's much trickier, as the melanin's prone to absorbing the energy, and light hairs simply don't, unfortunately, with electrolysis being the only effective technique at present for such hairs.

Just the face would be much cheaper, though annoyingly, many clinics don't publish prices. It's worth asking about a discount for a 6 or 8 session treatment, which can be much lower than paying for each separately.

@Kirin we're not planning on GRS at the moment anyway, and we do have fairly dark hair

@starkatt we do have dark hair and light skin so that's good

from what others are saying it sounds like it's way too expensive for us to afford in the forseeable future though >.<

@Felthry Electrolysis works by inserting a fine needle into each hair follicle and running a current through it. You definitely want lidocaine gel for this. Even then, most people find it very painful and the pain lasts a number of seconds per hair. Since it needs to be done one hair at a time it's also extremely slow.

The upside is that unlike laser, electrolysis is guaranteed to kill the hair permanently. (Well, barring hair growth cycles, which are a thing that the esthetician for either service will explain.)

My recommendation: get a steries or two of laser, then consider electrolysis if there's stubborn hairs remaining.

@starkatt What's a steries?

@Felthry series, sorry.

@starkatt ah, okay. And yeah it sounds like electrolysis is not only far too painful but if it's more expensive than laser we definitely can't afford it