Scarred in the quest for beauty

BELINDA MERHAB


Governments are dithering while some under-trained operators leave ungainly legacies.A walk through any supermarket or pharmacy tells the story: for women, facial and body hair have joined age and gravity as enemies in the quest for beauty.

Meredith Jones, a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney and author of Skintight: An Anatomy Of Cosmetic Surgery, says we are becoming a culture that refuses to accept hair on women; except on top of the head, of course. "There's definitely a lot of angst about it, and it's something that women seem to need to work on quite a lot throughout their lives. Some of them resent that," Jones says.

Now at work on an anthology about women and body hair, Jones says she interviewed a woman who encountered verbal abuse from men at a gym for having hairy legs. "We're so surrounded by these images of perfection that we forget to look at each other and see what normal people look like," she says. "With the mainstreaming of pornography, things like the Brazilian wax, which used to be quite extreme, have now become part of the everyday visual lexicon." Studies over 10 years show women find their body hair unattractive. In a 1998 American study, Women And Body Hair: Social Perceptions And Attitudes, participants watched videos of a bikini-clad woman, filmed first with body hair and then without. The participants judged the hairier woman as less happy, less intelligent and less attractive.

Permanent removal of women's pubic hair is getting more popular too. A study last year by the Cosmetic Physicians Society of Australasia found 75 per cent of clients cited aesthetics as the main reason for hair removal, and 65 per cent of women surveyed said they felt sexier without hair.

These sentiments have elevated laser hair removal to a multimillion-dollar business in Australia, with most hair and beauty salons offering laser or intense pulsed light (IPL) services. Hair, cellulite, pigmentation, scars and spider veins - indeed, most skin imperfections - can be removed by laser.

Upper lip "permanent hair reduction", a common treatment, will cost anywhere between $70 and $150. A full leg can cost up to $700 a treatment, and at least six treatments are generally required. Laser treatments in Australia are estimated to number in the tens of thousands each year.And this booming industry is largely unregulated.

Federal law requires laser machines to be registered as medical devices, but no NSW law applies to laser operators, despite years of mounting evidence that, in untrained hands, these devices can cause serious damage and scarring.
In May, Victoria's Human Services Department issued a tender to gather a working group to investigate regulation of the cosmetic laser industry, following complaints from women suffering permanent damage. No one has been appointed to the investigation.

The NSW Health Department has been aware of a problem for at least a decade. In 1999, the Cosmetic Surgery report recommended guidelines for the use of lasers, suggested operators be licensed and asked for accredited training programs. It seems to have fallen through the bureaucratic cracks.

A spokesman for NSW Health said regulation of lasers was the responsibility of the radiation regulator, the Department of Environment and Climate Change, which says it is waiting for the federal framework being prepared by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA).

In 2001, the federal agency assembled medical professionals to investigate uniform national regulations and, four years later, the working group reported in draft form on the use of lasers on people.

The working group leader, Stephen Newbery, of Tasmania's Health and Human Services Department, presented in that 2005 draft a doctor's email reporting 52 cases of hyper-pigmentation, or darkening of the skin, 22 cases of hypo-pigmentation (loss of skin colour) and scarring, 17 cases of burning and blistering, and four cases of lesions treated inappropriately, including three instances of malignant melanomas and one of a
pre-malignant mole.

The informant doctor, whose name was concealed, said more cases arrived daily and 96 per cent of complications were the result of beauty therapists using IPL. Another doctor's letter emphasised concern about beauticians not being trained to identify melanomas, the country's third leading cause of cancer death.

The working group recommended licensing operators of 3B lasers, and that patients be assessed by doctors before beauty therapists operate the most powerful lasers commonly used for hair removal, and IPL devices.

In 2005, the federal safety agency's radiation health committee accepted the working group recommendations.Alan Melbourne, ARPANSA's manager of standards development, says the recommendations are being assessed to test how the costs of regulation stack up against the benefits of patient protection. Recommendations will then be released for public comment.

James Walter, an investigator on the working group, says state and federal governments are sitting on their hands. "I've done my bit; I've told the state government representatives" who report to the federal agency, he says. "It's the state government which regulates things. They've had [the information] for a year, 18 months. They've sent the regulations out to the beauty therapists, and they [the therapists] say 'you can't do that'. The government is too frightened to act. Meanwhile people are being damaged every day because these beauty therapists have no idea what they're doing … We don't want to stop beauty therapists using IPL but we want to make sure that they're trained. With government the wheels turn slowly."

Meikin Rees owns Laser Therapy Centre, which offers a government-accredited laser and IPL training course. Rees, back recently from a laser conference in the US, says Australia has been slack in regulating laser therapies, compared with the US. She sees victims of laser burns daily. "Lots of people have been burnt and they don't have anywhere to turn to or anyone to tell about their experience. The public should be more aware not to go near these [inexperienced operators]."

Her course in laser and IPL runs for six to eight days, and participants are required to fill out a logbook of practical work they do with clients. But Rees says beauty therapists are more likely to take the free training offered by the manufacturer of the laser, which she and dermatologists agree is insufficient. "Bigger companies will offer two days' training on how to operate the machine and how to read the manual, but the
distributor or manufacturer may not know how to operate it themselves, or the skin and hair conditions. It's not as simple as turning on a machine; they need to know about health and body science and how to apply it accordingly," she says.She says her pleas to government have gone unanswered. ""We've made submissions to local government, virtually every local council in the Sydney metropolitan area, WorkCover, the Health Department at both state and federal levels.

"We received no reply from Tony Abbott when he was Minister for Health. We have tried to cover as many different agencies as possible, but it appears that it is too hot to handle really, just too difficult."



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People are judging on what they saw to their appearance.