Price Awareness: Laser hair removal

Laser hair removal is one of the most popular treatments around, and no wonder – you get pretty much guaranteed permanent hair reduction (providing you’re a suitable candidate*), the treatment time is super quick and you only need one session every six weeks or so.

The most cost-effective laser hair removal can usually be found at beauty salons or hybrid salon-clinic groups like Pulse Light Clinics, Sk:n clinics, Thérapie Clinic or Laser Clinics UK. Cosmetic doctors rarely perform laser hair removal themselves – instead, expect to have your treatments carried out by an advanced beauty therapist or aesthetician. This is because you don’t need to be a medical practitioner to perform laser hair removal and it’s a relatively straightforward treatment to teach and delegate. Still, make sure you seek out a reputable clinic that specialises in laser hair removal and has appropriately qualified, highly trained therapists (when things go wrong, it’s because the laser has been used incorrectly), so that you can be sure that you’re in good hands.

What influences the cost of laser hair removal?

As with any tweakment, several factors affect the price. For laser hair removal, these will be:

• Which area(s) you want treated – Laser hair removal can be done on any area of the body and most areas of the face, for all genders. The smaller the area – like the upper lip, sideburn or navel –the cheaper it’ll be, and the price will increase for larger or more intricate areas like the back, legs and genital areas.
• How many sessions you have – Generally, most people will need an initial course of 8 sessions to achieve maximum hair clearance (around 80%), though you could need up to 10 depending on your hair and skin.
• Which laser is used – There are lots of hair-removal lasers on the market, and like any tweakment devices, some are more effective and give the practitioner more treatment options than others. A newer, more technologically advanced laser may well be reflected in the cost of treatment vs. an older laser that might not do the job as well or as comfortably.
• If you opt for a package – Because laser hair removal is so quick to perform, a lot of people choose to have more than one area lasered to make their clinic visit more worthwhile. Most providers offer packages that combine two or more areas of your choosing with a decent saving on price – though it’s only more cost-effective if you actually want more than one area treated, otherwise you’ll be wasting money.
• Who does your treatment – As mentioned above, it’s more common to have laser hair removal carried out by an aesthetic therapist at a beauty salon or clinic than by an individual cosmetic doctor. It’s also cheaper to go to a clinic group that has several branches and specialises in laser hair removal, as this type of business model is designed to make laser more affordable and accessible. It’ll be more expensive to have the treatment carried out at a cosmetic doctor’s clinic.
• If you’ll need top-up sessions – Depending on the individual, that target of 80% hair reduction may or may not be achieved from an initial course of laser hair removal. It’s not uncommon to require one to four top-up sessions per year, so factor this possibility into the cost.
• Location – Those of us in the capital will always pay a premium on just about anything, tweakments included. If you live somewhere where the cost of living is generally lower, the price of tweakments is likely to be lower, too.

Taking all of this into account, the main variable with laser hair removal is which area(s) you have treated. For a full course of sessions, expect to pay around £90 for underarms (+ £9 per top-up session), £250 for bikini line (+ £20 per top-up session), and £800 for full legs (+ £80 per top-up session). It’s worth bearing in mind that many clinics groups offer 0% finance to spread the cost of treatment courses over a certain amount.

*Are you a suitable candidate?

That may depend on the type of laser that a clinic is using. Lasers work by targeting melanin, the pigment in the hair shaft, so they won’t work on white or grey hair. Laser hair removal used to be tricky for anyone with a darker skin tone, but the newer lasers can be adjusted to treat darker skin tones successfully, too.