Let's talk about something icky. Yes, let's face it: As beautiful as the process is, a lot of aspects of MtF transition are pretty gross. Let's talk hair removal!
There are many methods of doing this, but I'll focus on three: pulling, laser, and electrolysis.
Yanking!
The simplest and most direct method of removing hair is yanking it directly out of your skin. This can itself be done many ways.
But how I do love my epilator. It has a spinning cylindrical head with tiny built-in tweezers. I use it on my arms, hands, beard, and legs. It does an incredible job for an US$80 initial investment, though not quite as good as a wax. Starting off in most areas is pure hell, even with the slower "starter" head mine came with. After the painful, awful first run, the skin adjusts, the hairs get finer, and there's less of them to deal with at once, so it becomes somewhat of an addiction.
Laser!
While I've not yet even been zapped with the spot test, I gather it's an excellent way to cut way down on dark, coarse beard. Being both quite pale and naturally black-haired, I'm an ideal candidate. Short little pulses of laser light penetrate the skin and strike the darker hairs, which then seriously sizzle the follicles.
Like I explained to Connie (much to her amusement), hair follicles are like little zombies. You have to completely destroy them to get rid of them. If you just hurt them, they come right back to life!
This will be sooo worth it in the end, though. Plucking is the bane of my existence, because right now I can't afford...
Electrolysis!
Electro is the mother of hair removal methods, one that I suffered for about five months last year just before going full time. It remains even today the only method that guarantees complete and permanent hair removal.
Follicles are very, very persistent little bastards.
This method fries them but good using the electrochemical reaction known as electrolysis. A chemical coating is applied to the area, a tiny disposable needle connected to a machine via cable is inserted in each follicle with a hair, and it's audibly zapped, then plucked. Each hair comes back a couple times before finally dying due to growth cycles. (I don't completely understand that bit.) Thicker hair is usually done first.
It's an expensive, time-consuming, dreadfully painful process, but it's pretty much the only reasonable thing that will do the deed completely and finally. A typical transsexual beard will take one or two years of weekly two-hour sessions, and about five to ten big ones altogether.
I'm planning on someday clearing much of my beard via laser, and then following up on the rest (light hairs) with electro when I can afford to.
For much more in-depth and objective info on hair removal, check out Andrea James' HairFacts.com.
At last, at long last, I have undergone a full-face laser hair removal session! Two sessions, in fact, but the first time was only my upper lip.
With my job still going overall pretty well, beard shadow was still a frustrating problem, despite my using an epilator on my poor widdle face every day, and Connie's touch-ups with tweezers. The cheap fluorescent bulbs at work are like beard X-rays. Beard removal could be put off no more.
I got a free consultation to see about getting my upper lip lasered. But getting full-face treatments had gotten much more affordable, at only $135 per session instead of ~$400 as I'd seen just a year or two ago. So, I got one upper lip treatment, around four weeks ago, and yesterday afternoon, my first full face session. Yay!
It hurt a little, but it's definitely tolerable. Each zap (they're about the size of the hole in a CD) felt like a little cluster of needles poking into my skin for a split second. It's just like electrolysis except more hairs at once.
The hairs slowly fall out over a week or two as they push up to the surface, so you continue shaving. They stop growing after getting zapped (die, fuckers), so this process is a little slower than actual growth.
My results were really pretty good. Twelve days or so after my first treatment, the hairs in my upper lip had finally come out, and I had almost no shadow there for a week or two. Rock. Out.
I don't know if laser will indeed turn out to be truly permanent, but I imagine it will. In the meantime, I'ma get three or four more full face treatments and get the rest cleaned up with electrolysis. Then it's no more shaving, or plucking, or anything, ever again. Right?
Connie says (and I agree) that once the shadow is gone I'll never even be suspected ever again unless I'm trying to.
I'm already passing even better than I was. It's nice to be treated like a human being for once. I could get to like it.
(Warning: New Doctor Who season one and two spoilers follow. No, really!)
Mike and Melissa like to get me hooked on some pretty terrific TV. Most of it's British (or animated), which is no coincidence.
The new Doctor Who series is what we're mostly watching lately. I used to watch the old series with my dad when I was but a wee tranny tot, but I was too young to understand much of it, so it never clicked, and I never started watching it again until starting the new series from episode one a few weeks ago.
In one of the earlier episodes, the doctor and his companion, Rose, meet the apparent "last pure human" some 3000 years from now. She's a transwoman (made clear by lines like "when I was a boy") who's had 700-some surgeries by now, and consists of a face and skin stretched out like a trampoline, occasionally misted with moisturizers by her assistants to keep her alive.
I had a lot of reservations about this villain-ish character, but they were misplaced.
She reappears in another episode, and after some well-written science fiction-y action and drama, the Doctor and Rose take her (now in the body of her new, dying assistant) back through time and space to a time somewhere around now, when she still appeared human (and gorgeous at that), socializing in a ritzy, upper-class nightclub.
Okay, looong setup. Anyhoo. Just after finally admitting it's time for her to pass on, and traveling to this place and time, she addresses her younger self and tells her she's beautiful. Her younger self has the same expression I would have in the same situation, with pleasant surprise and slight guilt. And I started to cry.
It was another reminder that I concentrate so much on scrubbing the boy off me (like I'm doing between paragraphs with an epilator) that I overlook the girl, both inside and out, that has already emerged.
Let's talk about something icky. Yes, let's face it: As beautiful as the process is, a lot of aspects of MtF transition are pretty gross. Let's talk hair removal!
There are many methods of doing this, but I'll focus on three: pulling, laser, and electrolysis.
Yanking!
The simplest and most direct method of removing hair is yanking it directly out of your skin. This can itself be done many ways.
But how I do love my epilator. It has a spinning cylindrical head with tiny built-in tweezers. I use it on my arms, hands, beard, and legs. It does an incredible job for an US$80 initial investment, though not quite as good as a wax. Starting off in most areas is pure hell, even with the slower "starter" head mine came with. After the painful, awful first run, the skin adjusts, the hairs get finer, and there's less of them to deal with at once, so it becomes somewhat of an addiction.
Laser!
While I've not yet even been zapped with the spot test, I gather it's an excellent way to cut way down on dark, coarse beard. Being both quite pale and naturally black-haired, I'm an ideal candidate. Short little pulses of laser light penetrate the skin and strike the darker hairs, which then seriously sizzle the follicles.
Like I explained to Connie (much to her amusement), hair follicles are like little zombies. You have to completely destroy them to get rid of them. If you just hurt them, they come right back to life!
This will be sooo worth it in the end, though. Plucking is the bane of my existence, because right now I can't afford...
Electrolysis!
Electro is the mother of hair removal methods, one that I suffered for about five months last year just before going full time. It remains even today the only method that guarantees complete and permanent hair removal.
Follicles are very, very persistent little bastards.
This method fries them but good using the electrochemical reaction known as electrolysis. A chemical coating is applied to the area, a tiny disposable needle connected to a machine via cable is inserted in each follicle with a hair, and it's audibly zapped, then plucked. Each hair comes back a couple times before finally dying due to growth cycles. (I don't completely understand that bit.) Thicker hair is usually done first.
It's an expensive, time-consuming, dreadfully painful process, but it's pretty much the only reasonable thing that will do the deed completely and finally. A typical transsexual beard will take one or two years of weekly two-hour sessions, and about five to ten big ones altogether.
I'm planning on someday clearing much of my beard via laser, and then following up on the rest (light hairs) with electro when I can afford to.
For much more in-depth and objective info on hair removal, check out Andrea James' HairFacts.com.
Posted in epilation by Milla | Comments (4)
At last, at long last, I have undergone a full-face laser hair removal session! Two sessions, in fact, but the first time was only my upper lip.
With my job still going overall pretty well, beard shadow was still a frustrating problem, despite my using an epilator on my poor widdle face every day, and Connie's touch-ups with tweezers. The cheap fluorescent bulbs at work are like beard X-rays. Beard removal could be put off no more.
I got a free consultation to see about getting my upper lip lasered. But getting full-face treatments had gotten much more affordable, at only $135 per session instead of ~$400 as I'd seen just a year or two ago. So, I got one upper lip treatment, around four weeks ago, and yesterday afternoon, my first full face session. Yay!
It hurt a little, but it's definitely tolerable. Each zap (they're about the size of the hole in a CD) felt like a little cluster of needles poking into my skin for a split second. It's just like electrolysis except more hairs at once.
The hairs slowly fall out over a week or two as they push up to the surface, so you continue shaving. They stop growing after getting zapped (die, fuckers), so this process is a little slower than actual growth.
My results were really pretty good. Twelve days or so after my first treatment, the hairs in my upper lip had finally come out, and I had almost no shadow there for a week or two. Rock. Out.
I don't know if laser will indeed turn out to be truly permanent, but I imagine it will. In the meantime, I'ma get three or four more full face treatments and get the rest cleaned up with electrolysis. Then it's no more shaving, or plucking, or anything, ever again. Right?
Connie says (and I agree) that once the shadow is gone I'll never even be suspected ever again unless I'm trying to.
I'm already passing even better than I was. It's nice to be treated like a human being for once. I could get to like it.
Posted in epilation by Milla | Comments (5)
(Warning: New Doctor Who season one and two spoilers follow. No, really!)
Mike and Melissa like to get me hooked on some pretty terrific TV. Most of it's British (or animated), which is no coincidence.
The new Doctor Who series is what we're mostly watching lately. I used to watch the old series with my dad when I was but a wee tranny tot, but I was too young to understand much of it, so it never clicked, and I never started watching it again until starting the new series from episode one a few weeks ago.
In one of the earlier episodes, the doctor and his companion, Rose, meet the apparent "last pure human" some 3000 years from now. She's a transwoman (made clear by lines like "when I was a boy") who's had 700-some surgeries by now, and consists of a face and skin stretched out like a trampoline, occasionally misted with moisturizers by her assistants to keep her alive.
I had a lot of reservations about this villain-ish character, but they were misplaced.
She reappears in another episode, and after some well-written science fiction-y action and drama, the Doctor and Rose take her (now in the body of her new, dying assistant) back through time and space to a time somewhere around now, when she still appeared human (and gorgeous at that), socializing in a ritzy, upper-class nightclub.
Okay, looong setup. Anyhoo. Just after finally admitting it's time for her to pass on, and traveling to this place and time, she addresses her younger self and tells her she's beautiful. Her younger self has the same expression I would have in the same situation, with pleasant surprise and slight guilt. And I started to cry.
It was another reminder that I concentrate so much on scrubbing the boy off me (like I'm doing between paragraphs with an epilator) that I overlook the girl, both inside and out, that has already emerged.
She's beautiful, both inside and out.
And I'm still scrubbing.
Posted in epilation, hindsight, transition by Milla | Post a Comment?