Beauty + Review: Let’s Talk Hair Removal – Sumuzu Treatment

**TMI Post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Also, no prudes please.**

Unwanted body hair has always been the bane of my existence. Okay, I’m exaggerating. But really, unwanted hair removal is something that I’ve dabbled with for years.

Being half-European and half-Asian, I was born with crazy hair growth rates. I came out with a full head of hair and through the years, I realised that it only takes literally months for me to go from having a bob to medium-length hair. I grew my bob into waist-length hair in less than a year, I tell you.

And while I’m happy with the close to bionic hair growth rate I have for my head, I would have to admit that body hair wise, it’s the same. And it’s not as fun.

My grandmother often said that if I didn’t start shaving and plucking when I was younger, all my body hair would have fallen off by now or they would be so thin, they wouldn’t be noticeable. I guess for some, it may work. But alas, it’s pretty obvious how that side story ended.

I threw shaving out the window as early as 15. It made the hair on my legs thick and coarse. It also made the skin very itchy. I tried waxing and I’ve never looked back.

Monthly, I go for a full-leg, underarm, and Brazilian wax. There, I said it. But before pervs start getting too excited and prudes start judging me by giving Brazilian waxing a sexual/negative connotation, let me just clear the air by saying that some people remove their hair down there because they are hygiene freaks. #SorryNotSorry

Getting your period with a full bush is hard. Anybody who denies this is seriously demented. It takes longer to clean and blood will cling to things and dry up there. (Whoa, look at all the men go! Running as far away from my blog as possible. Ta-ta!)

Of course, I don’t judge people who choose not to remove hair down there or in any part of their body. Your body, your decisions. I’m just talking about my choices and saying how tired I am of people who give unwanted hair removal so much sexual connotation.

So now that we’ve established how big of a hair-removal treatment fan I am, let’s get on to some of the stuff I tried all these years.

Shaving

No. Just no. Never going back that route ever again. This is the worst thing to do  – ever. It leaves your skin dry and itchy and the hair grows back thick and coarse.

Waxing

Oh so painful. It gets better in time but still enough to make you want to call your mother. There’s a price for cleaner female parts, smooth legs, and underarms that you can bare without giving the people around you a shock. It’s also not permanent so you will get your hair back in a couple of weeks. Unlike in shaving though, hair grows finer and it takes longer to grow back.

IPL

Thanks to science and technology, we now have more permanent ways of removing hair. There’s laser hair removal as well as its gentler sister Intense Pulsed Light (IPL).

I’ve tried IPL and no, it’s not completely painless and you have to do a lot of sessions – once every two months. So it takes soooo long to actually get rid of the hair. The effect won’t last till you die though. As they say after a few years, hair may start growing back normally again. It’s a case to case basis.

I was able to do 4 sessions before completely giving up on it. I travel a lot and have quite a ton of things to attend to when I’m in KL so my appointments that were made two months prior keep getting pushed to a different date (Read: Forgotten).

Sumuzu Hair Removal Treatment

And now, the main topic of my now winding post. There has been a recent breakthrough, ladies. Needless to say, I was ecstatic when I was told and invited to try it. More effective than IPL? My interest was definitely piqued.

I duplicated the information given to me to easily differentiate Sumuzu from its most popular competitors:

About a month after going for three sessions, here’s what I have to say:

Venue: Ido’s Clinic

All my visits to Ido’s Clinic Kota Damansara were quick and pleasant. The place is bright and clean and it gives you the feeling of being in a spa. The treatment rooms are spacious and won’t make you feel claustrophobic.

The members of the staff are professional and speak enough English to let me know how my treatment would go and what’s actually happening. This is important to me as I’m pretty fussy about my vanities. I’ve actually been to places where the staff and I can’t understand each other and such situations rarely end well. I’ve had ridiculous hair cuts due to such circumstances.

Treatment

Sumuzu uses a similar machine to the IPL called Koolite. They asked me to shave my hair off my underarms the day before and I obliged. I have shunned shaving years ago but since I’m getting its effects corrected, I decided to just give it one more go – its last, hopefully.

A cooling gel was applied all over the area (again, just like in IPL) before they fired up the machine and started the treatment.

The attendant ran the machine’s handheld part through the underarm area, quickly going backwards and forwards. It was emitting light the way an IPL machine would. However, I didn’t need any weird-looking sunglasses for Sumuzu.

It was also a lot less painful than IPL. Yes, it’s not entirely painless. You feel the light doing its magic and it can feel hot and prickly at times but it’s nothing that you cannot tolerate.

It takes a full 5 (!) minutes to treat both your armpits. For IPL, it takes half an hour so it’s just perfect for busy people.

Results

I noticed that just after the first session, there was hardly any hair growing back. A feat that IPL was not able to achieve or even get close to.

The staff at Ido’s Clinic will often advise people going for Sumuzu to shave a day before the treatment but for my second and third sessions, no shaving was needed anymore.

Ok people, get ready for an underarm photo. Even though I’m not so fond of the idea of showing you my underarm, I thought I should do it for transparency and posterity’s sake. Ah, the things I do for this blog. 😉

Taken right after the third session. The pores are slightly enlarged due to the treatment and the hot/prickly feeling but now, they’re practically invisible! The lines are a lot less noticeable too.

It’s been weeks since my last session and there’s still no hair. When it comes to being effective, I can really say that Sumuzu is the best hair removal treatment I have tried – hands down.

When it comes to the whitening aspect of the treatment, I won’t be able to comment since I’ve always been evenly fair – even pale to some extent. I get weird comments on my photos about how I have even-toned underarms and I never knew that dark underarms are an actual thing till recently. True story.

However, I can say that my pores that were abused by plucking and waxing became a lot smaller. I noticed this a week after my last treatment. The lines on the skin also got a lot better.

Now we move on to sweating. Well, I hardly sweat in general. Anyone who knows me personally can attest to that. Even after intense Impulse training, I only have a couple of beads of sweat on my forehead and anywhere else on my body. It’s weird, I know. But after going for Sumuzu, there’s even less sweating in the underarm areas.

Is it permanent?

There is no such thing as permanent hair removal. Lasers, IPL, and even Sumuzu are the same. It’s more accurate to say that they are permanent hair reduction treatments.

Their effects can last for years, depending on your genes and hormones. At the end of the day, such treatments are more cost effective and less time consuming than waxing. So if body hair is one of your concerns, then I think such treatments should be considered.

For more info on the Sumuzu Hair Removal Treatment, do give Ido’s Clinic a call at 017-486 1992 or visit their website by clicking here.

More later!

Love,

Carol