Joelle Tori Maslak
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Published in
The Startup
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7 min read
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Nov 30, 2019
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I’ve always loved the verifiable, objective truth of math, and how math can help us understand our world. As a teenage girl, I particularly enjoyed statistics and game theory, at least at the level I could understand them (limited by my age!).
But I don’t like what that same math tells me now about transgender hair removal.
I wanted to know how long it would take for my facial hair to be removed. For a variety of reasons, I chose to do electrolysis and not laser, although I think most of this math also applies to laser removal.
At any point in time, about one third of your hair is in an active growth phase. For pretty much any hair removal technique, only the active hairs can be targeted for removal. With electrolysis, the hair is zapped and removed — so it has to be there for the zapping to take place. With laser, it has to be pigmented to absorb the energy. This is the first reason why all hair removal methods require more than one treatment.
The average hair cycle for the face is around nine months (some people have longer hair cycles). So this becomes the lower bound (least amount of time) for the length of time we have to do regular removal — an area of the face needs to be zapped multiple times during this nine months, regularly, to ensure that you get each hair as it wakes up.
