Remington i-LIGHT Pro+ Face & Body IPL review – in action!

I’ve now used the Remington i-LIGHT Pro+ Face & Body IPL6500AU IPL machine twice, on several areas (armpit, arm, bikini line). Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use it, and how it went (you can check out my earlier post for how it works and how cost effective it is).

Step 1 – Check your skin

There’s a cool little skin sensor on the body of the machine. You hold the skin on the area you want to treat against it, and if your skin is suitable, it makes a beep and the machine lets you use it. Of course, you can cheat it, but why would you want to?

Step 2 – Shave

Shave the area you’re planning to remove hair from – the more hair there is, the greater the chance of irritation. If you’re prone to shaving rash, it’s best to do this a day ahead. Don’t tweeze or wax – pulling out the hair from the root makes IPL less effective.

Step 3 – Patch Test

Starting on the lowest setting, place the head of the handset flat against your skin. It’ll make a little chirping noise when the sensors on both sides of the window are touching the skin. Zap a patch, then go up a setting, and zap a new patch. Do this until it gets unbearable (I’m a massive wuss so I stopped at Setting 3). Wait 24 hours and see if any irritation occurs. You should patch test each part of the body you’re going to treat, since different parts of your body will have different sensitivities.

Step 4 – Treat

If there’s no redness, you can go do the whole area! After treatment, be nice to the skin – don’t take hot baths, play contact sports or wax the area for 24 hours after treatment, and avoid sunbathing for 2 weeks afterwards. The hair will start falling out in 7-14 days – at first it’ll look like it’s still growing as the dead hair is pushed up out of the skin.

After 2 weeks, do another treatment, and after another 2 weeks, perform the final treatment. You’re done!

What’s the IPL6500 like in action?

The handheld part of the Remington IPL6500 is the size of an electric razor, and it’s comfortable to hold even for my small hands. The button on the head can be pressed down for each flash, or held down to flash every 3 seconds (4 if you’re using the face attachment).

I used this on my left arm, right armpit and right bikini line with the other side as a control. There’s noticeably less hair after treatment – since my second treatment was quite recent, I’m only really seeing the results of the first treatment at the moment, and it looks like about 50% of the hair is gone already!

Apart from the pain, I have no other side effects, and even then the pain is quite bearable – on the lowest two settings (the ones I tried, because I’m a wuss), it feels a bit like someone flicking you really hard, followed by a feeling of warmth. The biggest problem I found was that it took increasing amounts of willpower to keep zapping – it’s very effective psychological conditioning! I found that getting someone else to treat you is a lot easier, so you can just concentrate on relaxing and ignoring the pain.

It was also a bit tricky to make sure every patch of skin was covered, though there’s nothing I can think of that could solve that issue except for practice on my part.

I’ll be doing a final update a couple weeks after my final treatment on how much hair I managed to remove!