As a person just beginning my transition journey, I find that it is very easy to get caught up in the doom and gloom mentality, since there is so much negativity surrounding trans people right now.

I thought it would be nice to counterbalance that with some positive moments, gender euphoria, etc. that you all have experienced lately!

I'm very eager to see what has been making you feel good lately, and what makes transition worth the climb. Thank you!

  • NoStressyJessie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thank you, for sharing your experiences. I’ve been looking into at home IPL, and I know the technology has changed a lot since they were basically as seen on TV scam products and everyone said to stay away, but the #sponsored nature of most reviews had me skeptical.

    Edit: I’ve been looking at the Ulike Sapphire Air3 myself, but I’m not seeing any hard specs or data on the devices and their output, so it’s hard to gauge if one is “more powerful” than the other.

    Edit 2: the Iluminage TOUCH seems to be approved for a wider range of skin tones and hair colors, it MAY be better suited to applications where “more power” may be needed?

    • Krrygon@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      ·
      1 year ago

      Regarding those alternatives and the possibility of them being more powerful, I think when it comes to darker skin tones the devices actually have to turn their power down, to avoid burning you. On areas of my skin which are more tan than others, I can see the power indicator lights on my particular IPL device go down.

      I wish there was an easy way to compare the power of prospective devices. They never seen to give solid specs on like joules of energy they output or whatnot. I think your best bet is just to read reviews by people that have used them, and see what devices people have had the most success with!

      • NoStressyJessie@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        ·
        1 year ago

        Well, thank you for giving me a good little rabbit hole of research to fall down.

        This is probably the worst industry to try to research anything on. A lot of the products that aren't big names appear to be Amazon rebrand scams. If you take the high review counts and search back through the reviews, they were all stuff like pens, and charging bricks, and other random items until early this year.

        "reputable" brands tend to host their own blogs with reviews, and the other kinds of reviews seem to be sponsored as well.

        This could be the signs of a new industry trying to bootstrap itself to gain traction on products that could be revolutionary in the way people groom themselves, or it could just be an elaborate grift in a market that uses emotional manipulation and societal pressure to make easy sales on disposable one off fad products (although I don't think that is 100% true, as at home IPL has been shown effective, if not as effective as marketers would like to claim).

        I have a lot of experience (at least compared to the average US consumer) with Chinese Manufacturing and Industry, the nature of Chinese Copyright, and the positives and negatives that adds to the generic products category of consumer goods. I've always been a DIY punk and anarchist type and my interests have taken me from small engines to electronics and everything in between. If you know how to look with the right knowledge set, you can find some real diamonds in the rough, but most of the time that category of goods tends to cut costs in ways that severely impact the integrity or safety of the product, so you have to be careful when sourcing third party replacement parts or cheap thumb drives as an example. I don't mind buying a Chinese product from a "no name" company but it raises flags for me when they try to hide it and get a jump start on their product reviews, so here I am, broke AF and trying to do a cost benefit analysis on vaguely specc'd products among a gamut of price points.

        I think for myself, I want either the Ulike sapphire air 3 still or I may gamble on a cheaper product like whatever this one is trying to call itself and after I have time to save up some money here and there do more research to the options available and hopefully as the industry matures I'll be able to buy a nicer/ more effective, however you want to think of it, solution.

        I wonder if there is enough of an audience to be like the trans-femme version of Technology Connections and just do deep dive video essays on things as they pique my (and others) interests?