[kategorybee]

I'm a trans woman who's had a lot of electrolysis. Almost all of us get permanent hair removal on our face if we can afford it. Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations.

Electrolysis on my face and neck has cost me tens of thousands. Think $100 per hour, and it taking 100-300 hours to complete typically. Full body hair removal would easily run in to hundreds of thousands, but very few people will be able to afford that.

I also don't see the aesthetics behind it, but I guess that's the hetero guy speaking.

Women are expected to not have beards, and having one or any beard shadow will get you seen as "a man" very quickly. It's both for safety, and reducing the amount of dysphoria we experience.

(edited for formatting)

[holistio]

Thanks for the clear answer!

I looked at the arm hair in the video, than at my grizzly arms and totally forgot about facial hair!

That sounds super expensive, isn't there a trend to do that abroad?

I remember seeing Istanbul airport full of hair transplant patients, apparently people go there to have more hair at an affordable cost, maybe the opposite is also available at less than $100/h?

[kategorybee]

Electrolysis is something that needs to be done roughly every 6 weeks, as hairs regrow. Each hair can need multiple treatments to fully kill off, too. There's probably some countries where you can hop over the border to get it done cheaper as a day trip, but I doubt most people will be able to do such a long trip every few months.

There's cheaper places than where I go, for sure, but operator skill is a big part of electrolysis. It's the difference between getting scarred or not, and it's the difference of a hundred hours time spent because the operator wasn't using enough power.

The reality is that it's just time intensive, and there's not many good experienced operators around where I live

[pcthrowaway]

> Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations

Laser is also often (usually?) not permanent (I am the right combination of fair-skinned and dark-haired). And hella painful from personal experience, though I can't compare to electrolysis.

[stirfish]

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I was hung up on the arm hair.

[delecti]

FWIW, as a trans woman, I assumed that was for demonstration purposes to avoid showing anything intimate or identifying. Though some of us do remove essentially all hair south of the eyes.

[kategorybee]

Thicker and longer arm hair is still a masculine trait. Testosterone thickens hair all over your body. Feminising HRT does revert body hair for some people (but not facial hair, it's a biological quirk), but usually not enough to where cis women are if you started out hairy

[mghackerlady]

I feel like harrier arms on women isn't that uncommon, but that could also just be the people I hang around (they tend to be more punk/hippie than the average)

[stirfish]

The people I hang around tend to be more Italian than average. I bet there are a lot of factors