Shaving with laser?

[LaserSteve]

Not to mention the device in the video he shows, in my opinion, has in-sufficient cooling for any kind of diode laser with enough power to blast a hair..  Just from looking at the package volume, that puppy is going to get warm, fast.  Facial hairs are tough critters... Only way I can see it, is if he has an array of diodes along the edge and they only switch on when they hit a hair.

You would possibly need a fume extractor too.. These days I won't burn anything with a laser without a fume extractor, and for good reason. Some of the partial combustion results are very nasty.  It will smell.


I'm a former scientific laser field service engineer and university laser technician. NO way I can fit that kind of Constant Current DC power source in a razor, without a fiber or cord, for the two minutes it takes me to shave.

  The IEC and FDA laser eye safety  compliance would be a nightmare.

Read the reviews on the NoNo hot wire hair remover...   Results would be similar.

However The math on the blackboard  and the laser beam mode mapping software looks real enough and are  in line with classical optics.


Steve

[bigdawg]

Not to mention the device in the video he shows, in my opinion, has in-sufficient cooling for any kind of diode laser with enough power to blast a hair..  Just from looking at the package volume, that puppy is going to get warm, fast.  Facial hairs are tough critters...

You would possibly need a fume extractor too.. These days I won't burn anything with a laser without a fume extractor, and for good reason. Some of the partial combustion results are very nasty.  It will smell.


I'm a former scientific laser field service engineer and university laser technician. NO way I can fit that kind of Constant Current DC power source in a razor, without a fiber or cord, for the two minutes it takes me to shave.

  The IEC and FDA laser eye safety  compliance would be a nightmare.

Read the reviews on the NoNo hot wire hair remover...   Results would be similar.


Steve

Steve, I hear ya. I am a laser spectroscopist too and have worked at a major raman spectrometry company before moving to a federal research lab; and all the claims made by this product sound highly implausible from the standpoint of the current technology; not to mention the price point too.

I would love to have that kind of powerful laser for less than $200 and I am sure many spectroscopists would appreciate that too especially the technicians using portable raman spectrometers. The patent application mentioned that they have developed these high powered batterey operated lasers for all three wavelength ranges (red, blue and green), so what's stopping them from marketing that directly instead of messing around with shaving.

[bigdawg]

Moreover, have you ever played with a high powered laser to burn off the hair like in their video? I have used it on my arms, and I can tell you that the smell of burning hair is very unpleasant.

It's a bulk effect though, they aim to destroy the follicle. This device would aim to just sever the hair near the skin.

Thirdly, how do you minimize the irritation/laser burn.

You would focus the laser from a device like this in a fundamentally different way than the long term hair removal devices, the severity of heating/tissue damage remains to be seen.

True, but I am very skeptical that a handheld laser powered by a AA or a AAA sized battery (thats what it looks like in their patent application) would be anywhere close to being powerful enough to even sever the hair. They are claiming on the comment section that a new video demonstrating their shaver will be posted by the end of this week. Lets see if that offers any more clues.

[bigdawg]

A new update posted by the creators on the lack of video:

Thank you to everyone that has backed us so far! We're so happy that you've decided to join the shaving revolution!

We've received a lot of feedback, which is really great. We wanted to address a few concerns & give a little update.

Firstly we'd like to talk about why we don't have a live product demo in the video. For this question I'll let our CEO & Co-Founder Morgan Gustavsson answer:

"Our proprietary fiber-optics are manually drawn in our laboratory. These must be of micron (um) tolerances and it is therefore incredibly difficult to get a consistent surface property along the entire length of the razor when drawing them manually. Hence not always does the entire surface length of the manually drawn prototype fiber optic emit the same power to cut the hair.

We will in any case attempt to post one later in the week in an update. We have production agreements in place with some of the worlds largest manufacturers of fiber-optics for computer controlled precision manufacturing of large quantities of extremely high tolerance of the special optics needed for the laser razor. We need your support to execute on those agreements to production."

Essentially, it's difficult to do in our lab, but we have an agreement in place with the manufacturer capable of producing these fiber optics at such a tolerance. They are ready to start as soon as our campaign has successfully finished. Which is why we need your support. However we are working on a way to show you a more thorough demonstration in our first weekly video update.

Safety has also been another concern. Safety is our absolute priority. The Skarp Razor is incredibly safe. Anything to do with lasers makes people think of James Bond or Dr. Evil. But essentially it's just light. The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a particular wavelength of light. It's really fascinating! If there's enough interest, we can post a video update explaining in detail how it works. Let us know in the comments!

There are also no long or short term side effects from using the Skarp Razor. No peer reviewed studies have ever shown any side effects from our level visible light.

We've also heard your concerns about the rechargeable battery, so we are looking into using a user replaceable battery instead.

We have also added more shipping destinations like South Korea, China, Japan & Australia. We're really excited to ship to those countries.

We really appreciate your feedback, please keep it coming, we read every single comment & message.

The shaving revolution has begun!

I dont know enough about fiber optics and tolerance of the commercially available ones, but this claim sounds a bit fishy. can anyone with experience in that confirm their claims?

[SkarpRazor]

Hi everyone,
We are men of science at Skarp so we think skepticism is very healthy.
Just want to address a couple gf things.
The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a certain wavelength of light. This means the laser is eye safe & capable of running on a AAA battery.
We've had a number of comments regarding the battery, & will decided to change to a user replaceable battery such is the overwhelming demand for it.
Feel free to head over to Kickstarter & post any other questions, i'll be checking back here too.

[Stupid Beard]

You would possibly need a fume extractor too.. These days I won't burn anything with a laser without a fume extractor, and for good reason. Some of the partial combustion results are very nasty.  It will smell.

As a bearded former smoker, I have had quite a number of accidental beard fires so I can attest to how badly burning beard smells. It's also very difficult to get away from it when it's right under you nose.

[fcb]

You would possibly need a fume extractor too.. These days I won't burn anything with a laser without a fume extractor, and for good reason. Some of the partial combustion results are very nasty.  It will smell.

As a bearded former smoker, I have had quite a number of accidental beard fires so I can attest to how badly burning beard smells. It's also very difficult to get away from it when it's right under you nose.

Is there such a thing as a non-accidental beard fire???

Presumably if the Skarp chaps have managed to tune the laser spectra to destroy a key molecule, then the hair may just break at that point and not burn.

[Marco]

True, but I am very skeptical that a handheld laser powered by a AA or a AAA sized battery (thats what it looks like in their patent application) would be anywhere close to being powerful enough to even sever the hair.

With a doped glass amplifier and a pulsed laser diode the battery isn't really an issue. That just limits how long it can work, not the peak power.

The problem is the cost and size.

[LaserSteve]

Point of Order Sir, having worked on doped glass and doped YAG lasers they are highly inefficient for this task.  That was the point of going to flashlamp based  IPL techniques for the other hair removal techniques.   He needs a "direct" laser diode, not a multistage process. Nor will "Q Switching" help him much, as that means he needs a laser medium with a long upper state storage time.  Besides ND:YAG and ND:Vandate rods are not easy to grow, nor is ND:Glass. That alone would drive the manufacturing  cost thru the roof. Trying to get a free running passive Q-Switch working at such low rep rates would not be a snazzy task either.

So, reading between the lines, here is my best guess.  He  probably has an "edge emitting" fiber optic pumped by a laser diode. When a hair hits the fiber edge, the total internal refraction is spoiled inside the fiber and it couples energy into the hair at the point of contact.  That is the reason he's mentioning the expensive custom drawn fiber. If its too small in diameter it is very difficult to couple enough light into the fiber for the process to work.  If it is too large, the coupling process when the hair spoils the internal refraction  is very inefficient or becomes several orders of magnitude too weak.

I still doubt cutting the hair is anything but an exothermic process.  I doubt you can break chemical bonds fast enough with a narrowband diode laser that drifts in wavelength like crazy.  Wavelength Drift is on the order of 0.2 nanometers per degree C for most diode materials, although some commonly used ones are far worse..  He may have found an adsorption maxima that is very efficient, but strong polymeric bonds do not just break apart by photo driven processes.

Steve

[bigdawg]

I still doubt cutting the hair is anything but an exothermic process.  I doubt you can break chemical bonds fast enough with a narrowband diode laser that drifts in wavelength like crazy.  Wavelength Drift is on the order of 0.2 nanometers per degree C for most diode materials, although some commonly used ones are far worse..

Steve

It definately is an exothermic process.

quotes from their patent:

"Hair shafts can be severed with high intensity light via absorption heating and burning and/or melting of the shaft"

"Additionally, to damage and/or cut one or more hair shafts with light, at least some of the light energy is absorbed by the hair shaft and converted into heat or induce a bond breaking mechanism. There are three chromophores in hair that substantially absorb light—melanin, keratin, and water. Keratin and water have absorption peaks at around 3000 nm. Melanin has an absorption peak around 300 nm, but remains relatively flat, decreasing almost linearly (on a logarithmic scale) to about 3000 nm. Darker hair, for example, black and brown hair, contains melanin and can be damaged or cut by sufficient amounts of ultraviolet (UV), visible (VIS), near infrared (NIR), and many infrared (IR) wavelengths."

They are worried about smell of burning hair; hence this:

"The device may also include a vacuum source coupled to the support and configured to provide aspiration near the cutting region."

I still havnt figured out how they are going to accomplish all these things with a handheld laser powered by a AAA battery  .

BTW, they reduced the battery life from earlier claim of 10 years to 1 month 

[bigdawg]

Hi everyone,
We are men of science at Skarp so we think skepticism is very healthy.
Just want to address a couple gf things.
The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a certain wavelength of light. This means the laser is eye safe & capable of running on a AAA battery.
We've had a number of comments regarding the battery, & will decided to change to a user replaceable battery such is the overwhelming demand for it.
Feel free to head over to Kickstarter & post any other questions, i'll be checking back here too.

we can get to the exact mode of action later since I dont want to quibble about symantics of "breaking" vs cutting/burning hair; but can you just provide detailed specs of the laser inscluing its output, power consumption, heat generated etc.

your patent claims list bunch of different wavelengths; I am not quite sure which one made it in the final design.

" The device of claim 1, wherein the wavelength is within one or more ranges selected from a group consisting of: 380 nm to 480 nm, 380 nm to 500 nm, 400 nm to 500 nm, 2500 nm to 3500 nm, 2950 nm to 3050 nm, and 2700 nm to 3500 nm."

[LaserSteve]

I'm still trying to figure out how to keep the optics clean and scratch free.
There is a an immense variation in laser hobbyists.  We have the "burners" who like to burn things with small hand held lasers. They give the wavelength collectors, pointer collectors, light show guys, and laser machinists,  a bad name.  However they often can get "burning"of spots on  plastics and biomaterials  down to 35-50 mW with a tightly focused beam.... There is a big difference between "burning" where they sit there fascinated for 30-60 seconds,  and readily cutting fast enough across a 30-40 mm swath to shave.  Burners may fry, blacken, melt or pierce stuff, but cutting with CW lasers  is always on the order of watts or more.

So lets jump up to 200 mW of near  IR, marginal, but it might do something reasonable  to a single hair with perfect, and I mean perfect, free space  optics... We're probably more or less on the order of Watts for a really good  optical shave...

Data sheet:

http://www.cnilaser.com/diode_laser808.htm

The 200 mW diode needs  280 mA at a 2.28 Vf ,  is ~ 650 mW  input power, not counting losses in the driver, which will be minimal but not so low as to ignore.  We'll need a boost driver to get the  "AAA" lithium battery up to  ~ 3.50 V to have enough headroom to run the laser.  If you look at this chart for one of the best batteries on the market, your looking at less then 1 hour of operation assuming a really well engineering boost circuit. Look at the constant current curve for 300 mA, 500 mA, and 1000 mA, which are the first three stock diode sizes. If you assume a boost circuit is 65 efficient, the time is quite a bit less.

http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/l92.pdf

Doable, but the average laser power is really, really, low. typical coupling efficiency to a decent sized fiber is probably 85% on a good day. Evanescent coupling from a fiber is not that awesome a way to extract energy, either..

I can see it being done, but  am I  ever skeptical...    If I want a laser razor, I'd want  localized ablation, not cutting, anyways..
I really hope these guys can prove me wrong on a production basis, but its going to be tricky to beat a modern multi-blade razor.

PS, I went back to the video and he IS doing the Evanescent coupling to hairs with the prototype fiber..


Steve



 

[SkarpRazor]

Hi everyone,
We are men of science at Skarp so we think skepticism is very healthy.
Just want to address a couple gf things.
The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a certain wavelength of light. This means the laser is eye safe & capable of running on a AAA battery.
We've had a number of comments regarding the battery, & will decided to change to a user replaceable battery such is the overwhelming demand for it.
Feel free to head over to Kickstarter & post any other questions, i'll be checking back here too.

we can get to the exact mode of action later since I dont want to quibble about symantics of "breaking" vs cutting/burning hair; but can you just provide detailed specs of the laser inscluing its output, power consumption, heat generated etc.

your patent claims list bunch of different wavelengths; I am not quite sure which one made it in the final design.

" The device of claim 1, wherein the wavelength is within one or more ranges selected from a group consisting of: 380 nm to 480 nm, 380 nm to 500 nm, 400 nm to 500 nm, 2500 nm to 3500 nm, 2950 nm to 3050 nm, and 2700 nm to 3500 nm."

We're not looking to give away our IP

[bigdawg]

Hi everyone,
We are men of science at Skarp so we think skepticism is very healthy.
Just want to address a couple gf things.
The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a certain wavelength of light. This means the laser is eye safe & capable of running on a AAA battery.
We've had a number of comments regarding the battery, & will decided to change to a user replaceable battery such is the overwhelming demand for it.
Feel free to head over to Kickstarter & post any other questions, i'll be checking back here too.

we can get to the exact mode of action later since I dont want to quibble about symantics of "breaking" vs cutting/burning hair; but can you just provide detailed specs of the laser inscluing its output, power consumption, heat generated etc.

your patent claims list bunch of different wavelengths; I am not quite sure which one made it in the final design.

" The device of claim 1, wherein the wavelength is within one or more ranges selected from a group consisting of: 380 nm to 480 nm, 380 nm to 500 nm, 400 nm to 500 nm, 2500 nm to 3500 nm, 2950 nm to 3050 nm, and 2700 nm to 3500 nm."

We're not looking to give away our IP

  isnt that the perfect excuse whenever it comes to providing any specs for products with tall claims.

[bigdawg]

I'm still trying to figure out how to keep the optics clean and scratch free.
There is a an immense variation in laser hobbyists.  We have the "burners" who like to burn things with small hand held lasers. They give the wavelength collectors, pointer collectors, light show guys, and laser machinists,  a bad name.  However they often can get "burning"of spots on  plastics and biomaterials  down to 35-50 mW with a tightly focused beam.... There is a big difference between "burning" where they sit there fascinated for 30-60 seconds,  and readily cutting fast enough across a 30-40 mm swath to shave.  Burners may fry, blacken, melt or pierce stuff, but cutting with CW lasers  is always on the order of watts or more.

So lets jump up to 200 mW of near  IR, marginal, but it might do something reasonable  to a single hair with perfect, and I mean perfect, free space  optics... We're probably more or less on the order of Watts for a really good  optical shave...

Data sheet:

http://www.cnilaser.com/diode_laser808.htm

The 200 mW diode needs  280 mA at a 2.28 Vf ,  is ~ 650 mW  input power, not counting losses in the driver, which will be minimal but not so low as to ignore.  We'll need a boost driver to get the  "AAA" lithium battery up to  ~ 3.50 V to have enough headroom to run the laser.  If you look at this chart for one of the best batteries on the market, your looking at less then 1 hour of operation assuming a really well engineering boost circuit. Look at the constant current curve for 300 mA, 500 mA, and 1000 mA, which are the first three stock diode sizes. If you assume a boost circuit is 65 efficient, the time is quite a bit less.

http://data.energizer.com/PDFs/l92.pdf

Doable, but the average laser power is really, really, low. typical coupling efficiency to a decent sized fiber is probably 85% on a good day. Evanescent coupling from a fiber is not that awesome a way to extract energy, either..

I can see it being done, but  am I  ever skeptical...    If I want a laser razor, I'd want  localized ablation, not cutting, anyways..
I really hope these guys can prove me wrong on a production basis, but its going to be tricky to beat a modern multi-blade razor.

PS, I went back to the video and he IS doing the Evanescent coupling to hairs with the prototype fiber..


Steve

all great points Steve. I might go ahead and test the lasers I have on hand and may post a video about it. I showed this product to my spectroscopist co-worker with 30 year experience in the field, and he flat out told me that its simply not possible to do either of these things without using a plugged in power supply and generating heat/burning smell.

[Mr.B]

The most fascinating thing about these "incredible" crowd funded campaigns is that I get to learn so much from the experts on the forum here.
Thanks for your input bigdawg and LaserSteve.

[SkarpRazor]

Hi everyone,
We are men of science at Skarp so we think skepticism is very healthy.
Just want to address a couple gf things.
The Skarp Razor uses a low power laser, & gets its hair cutting ability not from the strength of the laser, but from targeting the particular molecules in the hair that break when hit with a certain wavelength of light. This means the laser is eye safe & capable of running on a AAA battery.
We've had a number of comments regarding the battery, & will decided to change to a user replaceable battery such is the overwhelming demand for it.
Feel free to head over to Kickstarter & post any other questions, i'll be checking back here too.

we can get to the exact mode of action later since I dont want to quibble about symantics of "breaking" vs cutting/burning hair; but can you just provide detailed specs of the laser inscluing its output, power consumption, heat generated etc.

your patent claims list bunch of different wavelengths; I am not quite sure which one made it in the final design.

" The device of claim 1, wherein the wavelength is within one or more ranges selected from a group consisting of: 380 nm to 480 nm, 380 nm to 500 nm, 400 nm to 500 nm, 2500 nm to 3500 nm, 2950 nm to 3050 nm, and 2700 nm to 3500 nm."

We're not looking to give away our IP

  isnt that the perfect excuse whenever it comes to providing any specs for products with tall claims.

If I was in your position, I would be just as skeptical. I would like to remind you all that our CEO is Morgan Gustavsson, who invented & patented IPL in the 80's. His most recent project is TRASER http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0035899.
Obviously we can't talk about real specifics at this point, but if everyone's interested, we could organize a Q&A with Morgan?

[Marco]

Point of Order Sir, having worked on doped glass and doped YAG lasers they are highly inefficient for this task.  That was the point of going to flashlamp based  IPL techniques for the other hair removal techniques.

You can't compare a process which has to work through the depth of a follicle with something which only has to work across a thin plane. Ideally for this application you'd ablate the hair, not burn it, laser diodes simply don't have the peak power required for that. The pulsed laser might be inefficient but slowly heating the hair across a long section when you only want a cut isn't efficient either. What's more efficient would require either a deep understanding of the thermal masses and conductivity involved or some actual math.

I have neither, but I have a good reason to prefer ablation regardless of efficiency. It would help with the smell, less volatile compounds put in the air than when you burn a longer section of the hair.

Nor will "Q Switching" help him much

I wasn't suggesting Q switching, I was suggesting amplification of a diode laser (need more/stages of amplification, but the optics are a lot cheaper). Maybe start with fiber before going into one or more rods.

Besides ND:YAG and ND:Vandate rods are not easy to grow, nor is ND:Glass.

AFAICS retina-safe lasers is the only way you'd get away with not wearing safety glasses with something powerful enough to vaporize or burn a hair. So these won't work.

That alone would drive the manufacturing  cost thru the roof.

As I said, the price and the size are a problem.

When a hair hits the fiber edge, the total internal refraction is spoiled inside the fiber and it couples energy into the hair at the point of contact.

Ingenious, would save a lot of energy.

That is the reason he's mentioning the expensive custom drawn fiber. If its too small in diameter it is very difficult to couple enough light into the fiber for the process to work.  If it is too large, the coupling process when the hair spoils the internal refraction  is very inefficient or becomes several orders of magnitude too weak.

Or he could want a fiber laser/amplifier, but the COTS stuff can't survive the bend angle necessary to coil it within the handle.

I still doubt cutting the hair is anything but an exothermic process.  I doubt you can break chemical bonds fast enough with a narrowband diode laser that drifts in wavelength like crazy.  Wavelength Drift is on the order of 0.2 nanometers per degree C for most diode materials, although some commonly used ones are far worse..  He may have found an adsorption maxima that is very efficient, but strong polymeric bonds do not just break apart by photo driven processes.

I didn't even consider that as a possibility, using high intensity UV light just seems an incredibly bad idea (if it's not UV it's thermal).

[Marco]

We're not looking to give away our IP

If you don't have a patent pending you already have if it works.

[AF6LJ]

You won't see that in the united states.
The FDA won't approve a laser device that has no safety feature to allow only skin contact before activation to be sold in the US.
There is device you can get in the US that uses the proper wavelength of light that it will work on dark hair.
It was marketed for women and purports to have reasonably good success.
Google Silk Epil.

[Kjelt]

Lets give them the advantage of doubt.
The beta tests would reveal soon enough if it is a workable device or not.

BTW as follow up product I suggest:
I would rather have an automated mains connected mask that scans and identifies pores on my cheeck and neck and blasts the hairfollicles once per month than still keep on shaving every morning,would save a lot of time, money and agony.

[pickle9000]

The most fascinating thing about these "incredible" crowd funded campaigns is that I get to learn so much from the experts on the forum here.
Thanks for your input bigdawg and LaserSteve.

Same here

[BravoV]

Is there any video or photo of the working prototype of the "head" shaving some hairs ? I can't find any ? 

NOT some computer rendered graphic or some pretty 3D printed plastic sticks which serve no purpose.

C'mon, at least they already have some crude, probably ugly and ghetto built cutting head that has been tested on some hairy pig's skin, right ?

I'm guessing there is nothing to be afraid of in exposing the IP, just by showing a real video that has been heavily edited/cropped and close up shot where the laser in action cutting the hair, right ? Am I asking too much ? 

[firewalker]

Is there any paper with your research on the subject and real data of the prototypes?

Will white hair absorb you l.a.s.e.r.?

Alexander.

[tggzzz]

You won't see that in the united states.
The FDA won't approve a laser device that has no safety feature to allow only skin contact before activation to be sold in the US.
There is device you can get in the US that uses the proper wavelength of light that it will work on dark hair.
It was marketed for women and purports to have reasonably good success.
Google Silk Epil.

A quick look at all the many "silk epil" devices doesn't show any such thing. Some do have a light so you ca see the hairs.

Can you provide a specific pointer or specific device, please.