If it is at all realistic for you to have a professional remove your facial hair, you should do so.

There are a few problems with diy laser hair removal. The big one is that you have to be paying close attention to laser placement to actually get complete coverage of the area, and it's really hard to do that by yourself especially while experiencing a bunch of painful laser blasts. If you fuck this up and aim at your own eyes, you could blind yourself.

Another problem is that any machine you could afford is going to be less powerful than commercial lasers like what you find in salons, and it will have a smaller laser "spot" - these mean longer sessions and slower progress.

Compounding all this is the fact that some home lasers don't even have a means for cooling your skin, which means that despite being less effective, a home laser will probably be more painful, and again, you don't just have to bear the pain, you have to focus on what you're doing while experiencing the pain, for longer than it would be if someone else was doing it.

TLDR: hair removal is not like hormones, DIY is simply unreasonable.

Addition: IPL is not powerful enough for facial hair removal; waste of your time and money. The cheapest machine that's at all useful is the tria 4x, and I don't recommend it for all of the above reasons.

Whats your skin tone and haircolour like?

I'm VERY pale and my hair is reddish, laser didn't work very well on a lot of my body, they work better with high contrast between skin and hair colour.

laser got some of my chest hair to go, but after like $700 of appointments over a year, you can barely tell I had any done (its been ~~five~~ seven years)

there was a while where I had really patchy facial hair and i felt worse for having it done

people I've spoken to who do more for their appearance than me, have told me the best way to deal with facial hair is to shave and wear make up

my tip is to try and accept yourself as you are, but that's easier said than done (i have continued to publicly live as a man because it's a lot easier, and actually people have no trouble accepting a boy named Sue, so to speak)

I know plenty of cis women who shave their faces, there was actually a story in a "news" site a few months back about a woman who shaved her face to better apply make up (the tabloids were losing their minds)

anyway sorru i'm rambling, love yourself bb

that other much longer comment advising you to not get a diy machine is good too advice imo

For what it's worth, I'm in a high cost of living area in the states and a package of 8 sessions for full face was under 1.5k here. I just had my 2nd done last week and I can't imagine how long it would take doing it myself but it's like 20 min for a pro to do my whole face. After seeing how much hair I lost from just the first session (I think I got lucky with where a lot of hair was in it's growth stage tbh, she spent like an hour trying to temper my expectations and most of my face ended up hairless after the first appointment) I'd definitely go with a professional again.

From what I read the home lasers aren't nearly as strong too. So more time + less effective + more effort vs going to a pro.

Where's that comrade building those electrolysis diy kits?

There's a bear with a hard-to-spell username (starts with J, I think) that has posted about their experience doing hair removal, they'd be the one to ask but idk if they've posted in a while.

My gf got a very nice one in Japan for around $300 USD, it’s quite effective but takes a fair amount of time to use. It’s the price of like, two appointments and can be used indefinitely. I wouldn’t recommend if you plan to do it all yourself though, I can’t imagine how she’d do it herself in certain areas and just getting consistent and even coverage everywhere is way easier when someone else is doing it. If you have a partner that’s willing to spend 1-2 hours a week doing it it’s probably worth it though! She really enjoys being silky smooth everywhere (can’t deny that I appreciate it as well) and it does the job quite well.

I can’t speak too much on efficacy for facial hair though as she’s cis with only the slightest whisper of hair on her upper lip. It completely removes that but I’m not sure how well it does against thicker and denser facial hair. Considering how effective it is in other areas though you’d probably just need to do more frequent maintenance for a longer period. It would probably need to be about the same frequency as shaving normally would be so unfortunately I don’t think it would save much time and effort until many months of use. It does for sure shrink the pores over time and slow hair regrowth, after a few months of use we’ve switched to like 2-3 times a month for maintenance and expect to eventually not need it at all. I’ve tried it on myself plenty and don’t think it’s very painful but ymmv. As pbcupola mentioned, the face specifically is dangerous for accidentally blinding yourself so again I would only recommend if you have someone willing to do it for you