Remember the Is the pain you feel normal? entry? I just came back from a casually scheduled maintenance appointment for facial hair removal. Between 2017 and 2019, I had received facial hair removal treatment to help with that facial hair giving me gender dysphoria.
As I talked with the person at the reception desk, who used to be my technician, about how we are doing, and how we changed since we last met (in 2020), I mentioned that I learned to “feel”.
And, oh, did that change!?! and how?!?!
Back then, when, I started my facial removal regimen, I started out with laser hair removal, and quickly shifted over to predominantly electrolysis, and after only 6 treatments, we basically stuck with “maintenance” and trying to get marginal gains. For once, I was a happy camper for only having very minimal facial hair (I basically had only a few fluffy patches on my jaw line and a very underdeveloped goatee).
I’d typically return from a treatment with a slightly red and swollen skin, but I invariably didn’t “feel” the treatment. Not the pain during, nor after. I do remember, though, that after a long session, I could sometimes notice a bit of a “it feels like there’s a lot of blood in my face” pressure when bending over to zip up my boots.
On transgender forums, people would always discuss how painful their facial hair removal treatments were, and how some would “only need to take a few painkillers prior to”, all the way to not being able to receive treatment unless it was part of a very intensive “pain management therapy” involving local anaesthetics.
And there I was… “oh, I maybe have a higher pain threshold, I come in and out, laughing.”
Back then, I’d “feel” the brief burst of air on my skin as the laser beam hits which I likened to a very slightly stretched rubber band flopping against the skin, or the moment the single hair would be removed with a tweezer after having just been zapped, which not surprisingly felt just like pulling a single hair out with a tweezer. Only directly above the upper lip, would I “feel” something that could be labelled like a remote cousin of “pain”. That region has a very high nerve density.
I’d sometimes come home looking like a black metal panda, from my mascara running. But the cause was always from laughing too much, never from pain. Sometimes, we’d even need to interrupt treatment, because the banter was too good to keep still.
So, today, after four years of “occasionally using a tweezer to get rid of the handful remaining facial hairs”, I just decided to give them a ring, and see if that amount could perhaps be halved. I had counted 13 that were noticeable, and the technician identified about 10 more (thinner, but still “terminal” rather than “vellus”) hairs when extensively canvassing my cheeks, lips, jawline, and neck. Think forensic experts looking for forensic material. 😛
As expected, it would be electrolysis only. There’s only single hairs that were in need of being removed, and most of them are white. Laser tends to work best on larger patches of hairs, and its success depends completely on the high contrast between skintone and haircolour; it attacks the darkest matter it encounters, as that is where the light turns into heat, and then burns that darkest matter (black hairs on fair skin is the ideal situation – I want to make a remark about the privilege of medical health care being tailor made for white people, but I will do that some other time). Electrolysis works on single hairs, by burning (with electrical current) the hair sac.
On to the treatment itself. I lasted for maybe 10-15 minutes. Most of the 30 minutes was spent chatting with this technician prior to and after treatment.
I felt pain. Lots of it. 6-7 of 10, where 0 is none, and 10 is excruciating. The mildest was “ooh, that needle feels like a warm object creating some unpleasant pressure in my skin” to actively trying to push my skull further back into to headrest, trying to pull away from the needle that came from “above”. And I am glad I wasn’t wearing mascara or eyeliner. I cried a lot.
Now I know what they’re talking about.
I don’t like the pain I feel. But I love that I am feeling pain!
