I have tried every form of hair removal on the market. Braun's smartest IPL to date blew me away

Let me set the scene: My parents, bless them, once offered to fund a full course of clinic laser sessions. A generous gesture, and one made entirely out of sympathy: give me two hours out of the shower and I have more stubble than a skinhead. After all, Chewbacca seems to have been an ancestor of mine. One with very strong genes.

Those clinic visits never happened, but in lieu of that I have I, over the years, gone through an exhaustive, occasionally humiliating education in every other method of hair removal on the market. Salon waxing. Sugar waxing. Razors (obviously). Hair removal creams haunted my sinuses for days. Epilators, which I tried once and retired immediately. And then there was the incident on a remote island with no razors in sight and an alarming amount of time on my hands, which ended with me tweezing my legs one hair at a time. It was torture.

But the strangest footnote to this particular story is, perhaps, that my legs were once the star of an IPL commercial. I was working as a photography assistant on set in 2018 when the real model's limbs simply wouldn't trigger the device. Her hair was too sparse and too fine to make the flash fire. My Yeti calves, as it turned out, were exactly what the job required.

So when I was handed Braun's Skin i·expert, billed as the world's first smart IPL that actually learns and adapts to you, I didn't need much convincing. The promise: up to two years of smooth skin, from face to ankle, across a full course of sessions. I had visions of myself as a slick seal on a summer beach. I said yes immediately.

The Skin i·expert is an intense pulsed light device, which works by targeting the melanin in hair follicles with concentrated light pulses to gradually disrupt the growth cycle until regrowth slows and eventually stops. What sets this apart from earlier generations is the intelligence built into it. A Smart SkinProtect sensor reads your skin tone at every flash and automatically adjusts the intensity, so you never have to think about settings beyond choosing between sensitive, balanced, or powerful modes.

My kit, specifically, came with two interchangeable heads: a Smart Flex attachment designed to curve around the contours of legs and arms, and a precision head for more delicate areas. A full body session clocks in at around ten minutes, done every one or two weeks across an initial course of treatments. There is also a companion app, which I approached with the weary scepticism of someone who has been let down by a beauty app before, and which I will get to shortly.

Opening the box, you can instantly tell there is an irrevocable attention to detail. First you'll see the sleek, slightly sci-fi handheld device with a cord that plugs straight into the wall, nestled next to a complementary razor and the two interchangeable heads. A booklet guides your through setting up the the app, which paired quickly and intuitively. Usually, I find beauty apps underwhelming. Here, it did a lot of the heavy lifting. Not only did it remind me of when I had my sessions schedules, but the real-time coverage tracking, which counts every flash and maps it across each body zone so you can see exactly where you have been, won me over. This, as it turns out, was not tech faff for the sake of it.

My first session started with my calves, my nemesis in the hair department and the area I most wanted results from. The process was markedly smoother than I expected, particularly compared to the large unwieldy devices I had encountered on that commercial set years earlier. Underarms came next, a breeze if slightly more intense in sensation given the density of hair there, and then the bikini area, which I will admit I was apprehensive about and which turned out to be, relative to waxing or to the dark days of island tweezing, absolutely nothing. I will note that on my very first flash I noticed a faint smell of singed hair, which had everything to do with my imperfect pass with the razor beforehand and nothing to do with the device. The lesson here is to be meticulous with the shave.

Here is the part where I tell you I was a model of diligence and consistency throughout my testing period. Dear reader, I was not.

Sessions one through three ran on a rigorous weekly cadence, and then by session four a combination of press trips and straightforward laziness meant I started slipping to every second week. The app's reminders were appreciated, even as they produced a low-grade guilt I could have done without. What I didn't anticipate was how gracefully it absorbed my inconsistency: rather than starting over, the app simply adjusted my projected timeline and encouraged me to keep going.

The coverage tracking, which I had mentally filed as a nice-to-have, turned out to be the feature I used most actively in those early sessions. It slowed me down in exactly the right way, making me move the device methodically rather than rushing through and missing patches of skin. By session five I had internalised the rhythm well enough that I barely needed it, but it changed how thorough I was at the start. Session five also brought a moment of delight: nearly hair-free sections across my lower legs, which is, plainly put, just the thing to motivate you to keep going.

I am happy to report that I am now slick as a seal, and will be for a long while. Results have come gradually, and lighter underarm hairs have proven stubbornly resistant. But even with my not always rigorous routine, I'm hair-free before midsummer. I can't even imagine how grateful I'll be on my next beach holiday when I won't have to think twice about bringing razor.

As for my scepticism about at-home versus clinic results, it has shifted considerably. Clinic treatment requires the same patience and the same commitment, and it also requires booking appointments, showing up for them, and handing over a significant sum each and every time. The at-home version is more adaptable and forgiving of an imperfect schedule, and perfectly suited to an evening on the sofa rewatching Sex and the City for the umpteenth time.

My absolute favourite argument for IPL, though, is that you have to shave before you use it. No waiting for regrowth, no minimum length requirement, none of the indignity of epilating. If I am going to shave anyway, and I always am, I might as well make those smooth results last considerably longer.