The fundamental principle of light-assisted hair removal is that a suitable light source can damage the stem cells surrounding the hair follicle, causing minimum or no damage to the skin or neighboring tissues. Therefore, new hair is prevented from growing for extended periods of time, months, years, or even permanently.1
A “suitable light source” should be understood as the right combination of fluence, wavelength and pulse duration. With respect to wavelength, the range 600 –1100 nm is favored because melanin contained in hair (and certainly skin) absorbs light inside this range.2 Moreover, if the wavelength is longer, the penetration will also be deeper into the skin tissue.
At specific fluence levels (in the range of 10 to 100J/cm2), the absorbed light is converted into heat that actually burns the hair. Pulse duration (normally ranging between 10 and 100 ms, but larger and shorter can be selected) should be set to obtain a threshold temperature at the hair follicle, and keep it long enough to impair the stem cells.
This threshold temperature, however, should not be too long to expand the volume of the affected skin as this would cause unwanted damage to tissues and discomfort to the patient.
Another aspect to remember is the relative melanin concentration in the hair and skin, which relates to the phototype of the skin (Fitzpatrick scale).
Darker skin is caused by a higher concentration of melanin, and the same principle applies to different kinds of hair. Therefore, the effectiveness of light-assisted hair removal is optimized on white-to-moderate brown skins and with dark hair (phototypes II to IV).
Phototypes I and VI are extreme cases and are more crucial, but Boslaser Brand beauty machine factory’ s diode laser 808nm machine can still be viably effective if the right fluence, wavelength and pulse duration are selected.