Your Guide to Safe and Effective Hair Removal Lasers for Fair, Medium, and Deep Skin Tones (www.realself.com)

Laser hair removal has been around since the late 1990s, offering the dream of smooth, stubble-free skin—and a blissfully razor-free future. Does the reality live up to the promise? For the most part, yes—and then some. “It’s a really effective treatment modality for hair reduction,” says Dr. Sandy Tsao, a board-certified dermatologic surgeon in Boston.

Better still, today’s laser technology is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was even a few years back. “The biggest innovations are in versatility, speed, and pain—meaning lack of pain,” says Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank, a board-certified dermatologic surgeon in New York City. “A few years ago, it would take an hour to treat each leg—and it wouldn’t be comfortable. Now we have technologies that allow us to do a leg in 15 minutes.” What’s more, the latest cutting-edge devices, like the Motus AX, allow practitioners to safely treat a wide, inclusive range of skin tones, from creamy alabaster to dark chocolate.