Pneumatic skin flattening (PSF): a novel technology for marked pain reduction in hair removal with high energy density lasers and IPLs.

Background: Intense pulsed light (IPL) aesthetic treatment, such as hair removal from large areas, is often very painful. The problems of pain and discomfort can be divided into two different phases: immediate acute pain and the long-term, milder, post-treatment discomfort also associated with erythema. The immediate acute pain is felt during each treatment pulse and can accumulate to an intolerable sensation after a few shots, resulting in the necessity of either using topical analgesic creams which have several limitations or else to considerably slow down the process and/or apply less efficient low-energy densities.