What a Difference a Year Makes

1 Year After My Fourth Q-switched Session

Yay, Spaceballs day is here again. The Internet, full of hilarity because the date (in American) sounds a bit like a line from a movie. What's worse is people's belief that it's still funny. Ah well. So, because the date is memorable, I remembered earlier that my forth q-switched session was also on 4th May. I thought it would be interesting to see how it had progressed, one year on from my fourth session. Honestly, I am quite impressed, there has been a substantial change since that picture was taken. I knew it had faded a lot over the year but I didn't realise it had been that much.

4th May 2017

That photo was taken in my usual spot with natural light. I learned something today, HDR on my phone. I rarely use it but did accidentally today. It turns out that hdr gets a much better representation of how the the tattoo actually looks. I did a comparison with normal and it looks like all my other pictures, the black parts are too dark and it's hard to see the fading. All my future pictures will be with hdr. I'm sad I can't go back in time and redo the others. This is probably the first time ever that time travel could have been beneficial to anyone.

I looked back and found that the image from last year was taken on 3rd May, one day before the session. I also have this image which shows how it looked about 7 weeks after the fourth q-switched session. Today's picture shows the difference three Picosure (after four q-swtiched) and sessions  and one year will make.

4 May 2016 / 2017

The collage shows three dates, 3 May 2016 (3 q-switched sessions), 26 June 2016 (4 q-switched sessions) and 4 May 2017 (4 q-switched and 3 Picosure sessions). The difference over the year is quite significant. I have had a total of 7 laser sessions, that's quite a lot. By the time I'm finished my current plan, I will have had 10.

I have booked my next appointment for 13th May, that's just one week away. I'm again quite excited about this session. The progress has been going well and I'm positive about it. This will be my fourth (of six paid in advance) Picosure session. Seeing the difference a year made, I now feel very confident that six (3 more) Picosure will be enough to remove the tattoo. After this session, I'm going to wait until September / October. This time I've gone four months between sessions and I think it faded the most in the last month. I feel it's a good idea to start spacing the sessions out more. I'm hopeful it will be fully gone by January (2 years of lasers) but that could be optimistic. I think more time will yield better results.