When choosing a clinic near you for Laser Hair Removal, you’ll find yourself bombarded with enticing marketing claims and offers that sound too good to be true. Here, we share our approach so you can see through the hype and find out exactly what you’re getting.
How do I find out what a clinic is really offering?
A quick search in Google reveals a bewildering array of seemingly massive discounts that are designed to look good at first sight, but are thin on detail. We don’t like that, so we take a more open and honest approach. We believe that if you know what to look for, it’s possible to be confident you’ve booked into somewhere fantastic.
Here are the things that we think you should look out for when picking a laser clinic for you:
1. No misleading 50% off discounts
Nearly all Laser Hair Removal is done in courses. But it’s very common for clinics to advertise that you get a 50% discount for signing up to one. They do this by advertising a ‘single treatment’ price, knowing that nobody ever really has a single appointment at that price. Those ‘50% off’ prices are really just that clinic’s standard prices, pretending to be a discount.
We have simple pricing per appointment for all of our Laser Hair Removal. Everybody gets our best price and you don’t have to make any commitment to qualify for it.
2. No bogus lead-in prices
Just today we were made aware of a local clinic advertising “Laser Hair Removal from £19”. Sounds good – until you get through to the detail and find out that it’s for a single earlobe or the tip of your nose. Be wary of this. These are loss leader prices, designed to get you interested before you find out the true cost of the treatment you want. We suggest you look for a clinic who has clear, transparent pricing on treatment you actually want.
We offer hair removal from £39, for which you can get some of our most popular treatments. All of our prices are on our website.
3. No pay-up-front contracts
Clinics want you to sign up to a course of Laser Hair Removal. Courses are great – you will normally need eight treatments to get the results you want. But be cautious of a provider who wants all of your payment for those treatments up front just to help their cashflow. We’ve seen a number of clinics in our area go out of business and leave patients stranded midway through their course.
We have no contracts. Everybody gets our best prices and pays for each appointment as they go.
4. Avoid no-name laser equipment
Ten years ago, beauty salons and clinics were all buying cheap IPL machines to carry out hair removal. Patients were getting indifferent results at best, and burned at worst. Nowadays patients are wiser to this and ask for lasers. So, predictably, there’s a flood of cheap laser equipment around.
A high quality hair removal laser will cost at least £45,000 (yes, really!) but lasers costing just a few thousand pounds are commonly imported to use in salons and local clinics. These lasers are often ‘white labelled’ so that you can’t find out where they were truly made or how old the technology is. Ours are made by Asclepion in Germany, and have the same quality of engineering that you’d associate with German BMW and Mercedes cars. Ask your provider about their laser equipment and the support they get from the manufacturer.
We have three state-of-the-art Asclepion diode lasers, and never use any old or off-brand technology.
5. Full CQC registration – without paying extra for it
Despite all medical advice to the contrary, laser hair removal is still basically unregulated and anybody who wants to offer it can set up a ‘clinic’ without registering with the Care Quality Commission. This is usually because CQC inspections are extremely rigorous – like Ofsted for schools, or food safety for cafes – and it would be easy to get a negative inspection report.
On the other side, some CQC-registered clinics charge a huge premium for the assurance that this status offers. While you should always look for value and quality from your clinic, this shouldn’t mean paying twice as much for the same level of expertise and the same standard of laser equipment.
We are the lowest cost CQC-registered provider in our area and got glowing feedback in our July 2019 CQC full clinic inspection.
6. A specialist medical team behind the scenes
What happens when something goes wrong during treatment? It’s a question nobody wants to ask, but you shouldn’t overlook it.
If a clinic has nobody medically qualified to draw upon, then they won’t truly know what best practice looks like or the science behind the treatments they offer.
We have a large medical team of Consultant Doctors and Surgeons working alongside GPs, Nurse Prescribers and Skin Practitioners.
Summing up
So there you have it. This is our approach and we would recommend you choose a clinic who has the same values and standards. If you’re thinking, “how do I find a great laser hair removal clinic near me?”, use these six tests. And be sure you’re happy with all of them before starting treatment.
Got questions? Stick them in the comments below and our clinic team would be happy to answer them.
