New York Times Reports on Laser Hair Removal
The New York Times published an article entitled “Zapping Teenage Torment,” which discusses teenagers with unwanted facial hair and the difficulties and solutions they’ve experienced as a result.
Below are a few excerpts:
ADOLESCENCE is an awkward time to grow a mustache. Especially if you’re a girl.
When Vidya Srinivasan was 7, girls would make her play a man in games of make-believe because of the downy hairs on her upper lip. “It really started messing up my self-esteem,” said Vidya, now 13. “I got to thinking that maybe there’d been a mistake and I was really born a boy.”
Her mother, Dr. Hema Sundaram, a dermatologist in suburban Washington, tried to reassure her. The amount of hair a girl sprouts (and where) varies widely based on genetics, hormones and ethnicity, Dr. Sundaram said, and a bit of facial hair is not uncommon among women who, like the doctor and her daughter, are of Indian descent.
“But she started crying, and I felt like crying with her,” Dr. Sundaram said. “I tried to impart that if someone is saying something bad about you, it’s usually because they feel bad about themselves. But it’s very tough to deal with that when you’re 7.”
Together they decided to get rid of the unwanted lip hair. Bleach proved ineffective, depilatory creams irritated Vidya’s skin, and Dr. Sundaram ruled out waxing because of the inflamed follicles she had seen in her practice. Since last year, Dr. Sundaram has brought her daughter into her office several times to use a laser to put the hairs — and Heathers — at bay.
Her tormentors were silenced and, Vidya said, “I felt like I’d won.”
. . .
And now removing hair, like getting braces, is making the transition from vanity to necessity for increasingly more parents and their girls and boys. “I have a teenage client who is on the swim team and is getting hair removed from his back,” said Rena Abdinova, a registered nurse and an owner of the City Skin and Laser Clinic in San Francisco. “He has a 24-year-old brother who was also on the swim team in high school and had hair on his back, but then it wasn’t an issue. People are becoming much more self-conscious about hair.”
