Laser Hair Removal and darker skin colours

Today, in 2025, laser hair removal is both safe and effective on humans of every skin colour, even the very darkest!  But this wasn’t always the case.  To explain why this wasn’t possible years ago, but is now, let’s dive into the some science and history:

Laser hair removal is a body hair removal technique that utilizes very bright light (lasers) to disable the cells beneath the skin that grow terminal hairs.  The method makes use of certain wavelengths of light that are absorbed readily by melanocytes (melanin cells) underneath the skin, but not by other cells in the skin’s surface.  Because of this characteristic of these wavelengths of light, these lasers are able to heat up and disable the cells beneath our skin that grow our hair, while leaving unharmed, other cells in our skin’s surface.  It is a miraculous little bit of science that is the basis of the entire laser hair removal profession.

When laser hair removal first became commercially available in the late 1990s, the machines created, and the wavelengths of light utilized (755nm and 805nm), caused extensive heating in the melanocytes of both skin cells and hair cells alike.  For “white” people, folks with Fitzpatrick skin types 1-3, this didn’t really matter because they have very few melanocytes in the skin anyway.  

But for “brown” folks, this was a big problem!  For people with lots of melanocytes in both their skin and hair, Fitzpatrick skin types 4-6, these wavelengths of light would heat up hair and skin both, often causing burns, and hyperpigmnentation.  Because of this, darker skinned folks were told that they weren’t candidates for laser hair removal.

Fast forward fifteen years and a new kind of laser was developed for hair removal.  It was called the neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet, or Nd:Yag for short!  This laser works at 1064nm, a wavelength of light that is absorbed easily by the melanocytes in hair, but not by the melanocytes in darker skin!  This is a particular trait of light of 1064nm, and it was a key discovery.  The development of this laser finally made it possible to provide safe and effective laser hair removal to folks with dark skin.

At Bluebird’s laser hair removal clinic in Toronto, we have two Nd:Yag lasers and use them with great success on our Fitzpatrick skin type 4-6 clients.  It is a pleasure to be able to truly provide laser hair removal to everyone here, and it is our Nd:Yag lasers that make this possible.  They allow us to get great results even for folks of the darkest skin types! 

If you fall into this category, we will take care of you!

Djuna Day