Side effects
Some partial and temporary reddening of the treated area was seen in 90% of the cases. A slight stinging sensation was noted in most cases at 40J/cm2 at 40ms. Truly ice cold gel showed to be an effective remedy to this. At the lower settings a sensation, however not painful, was noted. No purpura, burn, blistering, hyper- or hypo- pigmentation was noted.

Discussion
Over 59% of the patients had total clearance of hair growth 4-6 months after the treatment. However there was a variation in the rest of the material. This is not yet fully understood but the following mechanisms are proposed.

The darker the hair, the better the response is to the treatment. Therefore medium blond patients may have contributed to a less than 100% clearance. Medium blond hair and some dark blond hair patients may have needed more treatments for 100% clearance. The amount of treatment sessions may further vary between skin types, hair thickness and individuals.

Also different skin areas have resistant telogen phase hair follicles in the treatment area for different periods of time. Therefore a total longer treatment regime a with longer interval between treatments may be proposed for certain areas.

If the one very dark skinned and the two very blond haired patients are not counted in the statistics, 84% of the remainder had 90 -100% clearance of hair growth, 14% had over 80% clearance of hair growth and 2 % had less than 80% clearance.

Conclusion
As more treatments may have been needed in some cases it is, from the result of this case study, safe to state that IPLS boosted with fluorescence is an effective, painless and safe method of permanent hair clearance.

Nordfjordeid, Norway 99-09-14
Anders Larsson MD

Further Reading
Plasmalite Q+A
Case Study using Plasmalite (PDF)
Plasmalite before and after pictures (PDF)