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I built my own hair electrolysis machine
- slj 6mo agoVery good work. I will try and build my own from your instructions when I can afford to. Thank you so much for making this open.
- langfo 6mo agoWell done. Next project DIY IPL for those hair bears amongst us?
- cyberax 6mo agoIn general, experimenting at home with these kinds of light intensities is NOT a good idea. Way too much risk of accidental eye damage.
- jaggederest 6mo agohttps://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye-injury/ https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/07/how-i-got-my-laser-eye... A fun related story about how even nominally professionals need adult oversight when working with high powered lasers.
- NetOpWibby 6mo agoHoly shit what a story. JFC
- hsuduebc2 6mo agolol, nice to know that I can go blind just randomly while working on the street. I'm kinda curious what was sum of the damage in the end.
- cyberax 6mo agoWith high-powered lasers, you can go blind instantly. I also worked with lasers (in a lab, with all the safety precautions), yet I have slight eye damage in one eye. There's a small burnt patch on my fovea, so if I look at something like a regular grid (e.g. a page with text) with the damaged eye, the grid becomes warped at the point of focus. And I found out about that only when I was doing a regular planned eye exam (I was wearing corrective glasses). This type of damage is extremely common with lasers, and it can stay invisible and compound until the brain runs out of its ability to do fixes in post-processing.
- hsuduebc2 6mo agoWow. As my only experience with lasers is playing with laser pointer I suppose the laser damage of this type is mostly by multiple reflections that are not really even seen by visible eye or scattered beam reflected from some surface you are not expecting it from?
- cyberax 6mo agoThis type of damage is common if you look at the spot that the laser makes on an object. Your eye automatically focuses it into the foveal area. I don't remember ever doing that without protective glasses, but evidently I did at some point.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoYeah, late one day in the lab, tired, aligning lasers, I used a mirror to check alignment because I knew I shouldn't put my eye in the path - so, like a complete, overtired idiot, I put the path in my eye instead. And thought, Hey, that wasn't very smart! And Wow! I am (temporarily) blind. It wasn't an eye-threat-level laser. Thankfully. Which is why one wears bandgap glasses when working with those: it's SO easy to mess up!
- mghackerlady 6mo agounless you're styropyro
- junglistguy 6mo ago[dead]
- mininao 6mo agoCool
- oompydoompy74 6mo agoHell yeah this rules
- rie_t 6mo agoThis is very impressive... The temptation to build my own now...
- nixyhazel 6mo ago@y1n0 any chance that I can get in contact with you to help build my own? I'm already up to several thousand in spend doing it the traditional way (which has been very helpful!) but it's not sustainable even on an upcoming big-tech salary. thanks <3 hazel
- WillMorr 6mo agoHell yeah. I feel like if the world ended there would be a group of trans woman with a wind powered experimental estrogen generator inside of a week.
- BizarroLand 6mo agoI mean, it's just a fancy hydrocarbon, and in some form or another can be extracted from female mammal urine. I imagine there's a way to genetically alter yeasts to make estrobeer while they're at it, with the side benefit that the alcohol would serve as a natural testosterone reducer for a double d whammy.
- kaikai 6mo agoCan confirm, I’ve extracted estrogen from my own urine.
- seabass-labrax 6mo agoHow did you detect/measure the estrogen after the extraction process?
- gizajob 6mo ago[flagged]
- ermmm 6mo ago[flagged]
- danielmeskin 6mo agoThis account was made solely to leave this comment, for what that’s worth to the non-bad-faith users on here.
- ermmm 6mo ago[flagged]
- danielmeskin 6mo agoYep! I don’t comment unless I have something useful to add to the conversation.
- ermmm 6mo ago[flagged]
- estimator7292 6mo agoNah, calling out morons and assholes is always useful
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- goodmythical 6mo agoI have soooo many questions. Approximate hardware cost? Pain of needle? Pain of zap? How does the sensation of your machine compare to commerical applications? How long has it been since the first tests? Results from those tests? Is there some sensation that indicates having inserted to the proper depth? Is it an increase in resistance or an increase in pain? Have you used it anyhwere but the hand? Does the pain scale the same way everything else does (like the lip and chin hurt more than the arms?) Full disclosure, I may or may not have caused some scarring having attempted to do this in a very rudimentary way with some 9volts when I thought that it was purely the heat from the electricity that we were after. This seems to be a vast improvement over the nightmare I came up with, even with the car battery as at least you've got voltage regulation. >this board contains one or more chemicals known to the state of california to cause feminization :3 :3 :3 :3 You are a legend and an inspiration.
- ivraatiems 6mo agoI get electrolysis (from a professional, not DIY, lol) and it does hurt a fair bit, but it's not intolerable for me. It's roughly the pain of tweezing a hair, only repeated a couple hundred times per session. I put on a podcast and just kind of get through it. If this has been done appropriately and safely, it should be similar. One thing I will mention, having watched the video, is that I think this goes about the same speed as what the pros do? It takes around 20 seconds for removal of the whole hair (about 10 seconds of current plus 10 seconds tweezing, inserting needle, etc.) in the video. My tech can usually remove around 200 hairs in an hour, which comes out to about the same (200 / 60 = 3.33 hairs per minute = around 18 seconds a hair).
- throwawa-486297 6mo agooh wow, your tech must be real slow. Mine will do a hair every 5 seconds. But she’s been doing it for 20 years. I find this invasion of hacker news by trans women talking about hair removal delightful and hilarious. (Of course, we were all here all along.)
- ivraatiems 6mo ago
- magic-amoeba 6mo ago…it's basically a medical device designed by an idiot… That cracked me up!
- nulltrace 6mo agodesigned, but never tested
- a_t48 6mo agobased
- stavros 6mo agoI am equal parts terrified and amazed by this. Well done, fantastic.
- electriclove 6mo agoVery cool! How can I order one?
- sho_hn 6mo agoTindie is great for this type of stuff, if OP needs a platform. Though my experience is only as a buyer. That said, if you have a 3D printer these days the process of ordering a board with full PCBA from PCBWay/JLCPCB/Aisler and printing the case yourself is pretty easy.
- sho_hn 6mo agoExcellent hack, lovely write up. Learned about Embassy, which I didn't know yet. Thank you!
- brbnode 6mo ago[dead]
- AntiUSAbah 6mo agoI did not get all the transgender references in the comments but gemini found it without issues. Nonetheless, great thing to have this. You can have a great default 'shave', can get rid of your ear hair, the hair on your toe nails. I need this
- stirfish 6mo agoThe hair on your toe nails??
- AntiUSAbah 6mo agoAh no, sry on my toes behind my toe nails :D
- Kye 6mo agoFinally, directed energy weapons for trans people.
- holistio 6mo agoI'm a rather hairy man and I literally don't even want to imagine the pain of going through this hair-by-hair. I also don't see the aesthetics behind it, but I guess that's the hetero guy speaking. Is this something that M2F trans people typically do? Is it really this expensive? OP mentions hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- stirfish 6mo agoYeah, I tend to think of body hair as an adult trait, not a masculine trait. Aesthetically I see this kind of like a badass custom tattoo gun, where the tattoo is your own skin without the parts you don't like.
- stavros 6mo agoI think she meant that going to a place to get it done for the whole body costs that much. It still sounds expensive, but who knows. Though, I have no idea who would want to sit through something that takes ten seconds per body hair. I got a light hair removal device and it's waaaaaaaay faster and cheaper.
- nagaiaida 6mo agoanyone with skin that makes laser/ipl inapplicable, for one
- kategorybee 6mo agoI'm a trans woman who's had a lot of electrolysis. Almost all of us get permanent hair removal on our face if we can afford it. Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations. Electrolysis on my face and neck has cost me tens of thousands. Think $100 per hour, and it taking 100-300 hours to complete typically. Full body hair removal would easily run in to hundreds of thousands, but very few people will be able to afford that. I also don't see the aesthetics behind it, but I guess that's the hetero guy speaking. Women are expected to not have beards, and having one or any beard shadow will get you seen as "a man" very quickly. It's both for safety, and reducing the amount of dysphoria we experience. (edited for formatting)
- brohee 6mo agoStep 2, put the needle on a gantry (I suspect you'd need more like 5D CNC to enter the pore with the right angle) and seek and destroy hairs... As it is it saves money but not time nor skill...
- cassonmars 6mo agobased
- achr2 6mo agoThis is so interesting, thanks for sharing!
- RicoElectrico 6mo agoOne thing eludes me... We have thousands of hair follicles, how is that supposed to work in a finite amount of time?
- croemer 6mo agoOne step at a time? Quick back of the envelope: Assuming 30k body hair follicles, at 5s/follicle that's 42 hours. Now if you just want to do your arms this is like down to a few hours. Not so bad?
- fragmede 6mo agoSay it takes 10 minutes to shave a beard, and you have to shave it every 3 days, in one month, that's 100 minutes. In 10 months, that's 1,000 minutes. Two years gets you 2,400 minutes, or 40 hours. And that's just a beard. Spending 42 hours to get it done once seems like a great deal on comparison!
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- cookiengineer 6mo agoDamn. This went from car battery style electrocution to custom PCB design unexpectedly quick. Kudos, amazing design.
- mghackerlady 6mo agogod, trans women are cool (totally not biased at all what are you talking about :3)
- Zardoz84 6mo agoVery fan for this girl.