Threading vs laser for lip and chin: a Chicago cost and regrowth comparison

By Valeria Tartacovschi, cofounder, V&P Laser Hair Removal & Skin Care, 1317 N Larrabee St, Old Town, Chicago

Most people who sit down in our consultation room for lip and chin have a threading salon they have been going to for years. Usually somewhere on Devon, or a walk-in place near the Loop, or the little storefront two blocks from their apartment in Lincoln Park. They know the person who does it. It costs about as much as a sandwich. So the question they are really asking is not “does laser work.” It is “why would I pay two thousand dollars to stop doing a ten dollar thing.”

That is a fair question, and the honest answer has a number in it. Threading is cheaper than laser for roughly the first three to four years. After that the math flips, and how hard it flips depends almost entirely on whether your chin hair is hormonal.

Here is the whole comparison, with our published prices and the actual Chicago threading rates we checked.

The short version

Threading costs less until about year four. Laser costs less after that, but only if you finish your course and do not need ongoing maintenance. If your chin hair is driven by PCOS, perimenopause, or a medication, plan on annual touch-ups, and the crossover moves out to somewhere around year seven or eight.

And one thing money does not decide: threading removes blonde, gray, and white hair. Laser cannot. If most of what you are pulling is light colored, the price comparison is irrelevant and you should keep threading or look at electrolysis.

What threading actually costs in Chicago right now

We looked at published price lists from threading salons across the city in August 2026. Upper lip runs about $4 to $10. Chin runs about $5 to $10, and several places list chin as “starting from,” which in practice means denser growth costs more. A West Loop or Taylor Street salon sits near the top of that band. A walk-in spot on Devon sits near the bottom.

Call it $18 for lip and chin together at a mid-range Chicago salon. Add a normal tip and you are at roughly $21 a visit.

Frequency is where it gets expensive. Salons themselves advertise results lasting two to six weeks. The clients we see almost never make it to six. Chin hair in particular, when it is coarse and hormonal, is visible again in about two and a half weeks. Most people we talk to are going every three weeks.

Seventeen visits a year at $21 is about $357. Over five years, roughly $1,785. That is before you count the travel. Seventeen round trips is somewhere near thirteen hours of your year spent going to and from a salon for something that takes four minutes in the chair.

What laser costs at our clinic

Our prices are published, so you can check these against the full price list rather than take my word for it.

Upper lip is $125 a session. Chin is $125 a session. Full face is $225 a session, and a full face six pack is $1,150.

If you only want the upper lip, book the upper lip. But if you want lip and chin together, the two areas separately come to $250 a session, and full face is $225 and includes cheeks and sideburns. The full face package is almost always the better buy for anyone treating both areas, and we will price it both ways for you at consultation instead of quietly ringing up the more expensive option.

Most lip and chin clients land at 75 to 95 percent reduction somewhere between session six and session nine. So the realistic all in number is $1,150 for the six pack, plus one to three additional sessions at $225 if your hair is stubborn. Call it $1,150 to $1,825 spread across eight to twelve months, since sessions sit four to six weeks apart.

Where the two lines cross

Threading has no upfront cost, so it wins early. Laser is front loaded and then mostly stops.

Assuming $357 a year for threading and $1,150 for a completed six session course:

Crossover lands in year four.

Now the version nobody puts on a pricing page. If your growth is hormonal and you need one maintenance session a year at $125, laser’s line keeps climbing:

Crossover moves to somewhere in year five. Still favorable to laser, just later, and the gap never gets as dramatic. We wrote more about why hormonal regrowth needs a plan rather than a package in our piece on PCOS and maintenance scheduling, and the same logic applies to perimenopausal chin hair.

If you are the kind of person who would rather pay $21 seventeen times than $1,150 once, that is a real preference and not a mistake. Cash flow is a legitimate reason to keep threading.

Regrowth: the part the price tables miss

Threading and laser do different things to the follicle, and it shows up in what grows back.

Threading pulls the hair out at the root. The follicle is undamaged. Whatever was going to grow there grows back, at the same thickness and the same color, in two to four weeks. Nothing about threading changes the trajectory. Ten years of threading leaves you with exactly the hair you started with.

Laser heats the follicle through the pigment in the hair shaft and damages the structure that produces it. Hair that regrows after a successful session comes back finer and lighter, and some follicles stop producing entirely. That is why the sessions get easier and the intervals get longer. It is also why we tell people to stop when they hit their goal instead of finishing a package on principle.

There is a wrinkle specific to the face. Repeated plucking and threading of vellus hair, the fine light hair on the cheeks and jaw, can occasionally stimulate coarser terminal hair in the same area. This is documented but not well quantified, and I am not going to overstate it. What I can say from our own consultation notes is that when someone arrives with a chin that has gotten noticeably worse over a decade, the driver is almost always hormonal rather than mechanical.

The skin side, and why we are not going to pretend laser is risk free

A twelve month prospective study at a dermatology department, published in the Journal of Cutaneous and Aesthetic Surgery, tracked 102 patients who developed skin problems after salon procedures. After eyebrow threading specifically, they found molluscum contagiosum in eight patients, verrucae in six, and tinea faciei in three. The authors attributed these to poor sterilization and reused thread. You can read the full study on PubMed Central.

That is worth knowing, and it is also worth keeping in proportion. Those were patients who showed up at a dermatology clinic, not a random sample of everyone who gets threaded. Millions of threading sessions happen without incident. A clean salon that uses fresh thread every client is not the problem this study describes.

The same study is uncomfortable reading for our industry too, and I would rather quote it than hide it. Three patients in that group developed hyperpigmentation on the upper lip and chin after laser hair reduction. The device was a Diode 800. The treatment parameters were unknown. All three came from the same salon, and the pigment took eighteen to twenty four months to clear.

That is the whole argument for how our clinic is set up, and it has nothing to do with marketing. Post inflammatory hyperpigmentation on the face comes from fluence that is too high for the skin type, pulse duration that is too short, or cooling that is inadequate. Those are operator decisions. We publish what those settings mean so you can ask about them anywhere you go, our providers are licensed Family Nurse Practitioners whose credentials you can verify through the Illinois IDFPR, and we explain the licensing rules because most people do not know Illinois barely has any.

The other safeguard is the patch test, which is why we will not skip it even when you ask.

Skin tone changes the answer more than budget does

If you have Fitzpatrick IV, V, or VI skin, the pigment risk above is the thing to focus on, not the price table.

Older diode and Alexandrite only machines struggle here. The 1064 nm Nd:YAG wavelength passes through epidermal melanin and reaches the follicle, which is what makes deeper skin tones treatable at settings that actually work. Our GentleMax Pro Plus carries both a 755 nm Alexandrite and the 1064 nm Nd:YAG and is FDA cleared for Fitzpatrick I through VI. We go into the mechanism in our post on the Nd:YAG and dark skin.

If a clinic hesitates when you mention your skin tone, or cannot tell you which wavelength they are using on you, keep looking. That hesitation is what produces the eighteen month pigment problem.

When threading is genuinely the better choice

I would rather send you back to your salon than sell you six sessions that will not work.

Keep threading if your lip and chin hair is blonde, red, gray, or white. Laser needs melanin in the hair shaft to work, and light hair does not have enough of it. We cover the whole picture in our post on blonde, red, and gray hair, including why we refer those clients to the electrolysis practice that shares our building at 1317 N Larrabee.

Keep threading if you want your eyebrows shaped. Laser removes hair, it does not create an arch. Threading is a shaping tool and laser is not, and plenty of our clients laser the lip and chin while still going to their brow person every month.

Keep threading if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. We do not treat either, and we will reschedule you rather than treat you.

Keep threading if you are on isotretinoin or certain photosensitizing medications. The waiting periods are real and we list them in our post on medications and how long to wait.

What switching actually looks like

The transition trips people up more than the treatment does.

Stop threading, waxing, and tweezing the area three weeks before your first session. Laser targets the hair in the follicle, so the hair has to be there. This is the single most common reason we reschedule a first appointment.

Shave the area the night before or that morning. Yes, shave. It feels wrong after years of pulling, but the laser needs the follicle intact and the surface clear, and here is what happens when you skip it.

Come in with clean skin. No makeup, no SPF, no moisturizer on the treatment area.

Expect the upper lip to take about ten minutes. Expect redness for a few hours afterward, which is normal and which we explain in more detail in our post on redness and when to call us. Then moisturize and stay out of the sun, and our aftercare moisturizer guide covers what to use.

Between sessions you can shave, and you can trim. Do not pull.

Common questions

Does laser hurt more than threading?

Almost nobody says yes. Threading pulls hair out at the root along a whole line at once. Laser on the lip is described most often as a warm rubber band snap, and the GentleMax Pro Plus fires a cooling burst with every pulse. Ten minutes, and most people are surprised it was easier.

Can I thread between laser sessions if I have an event?

No. Shave instead. Pulling the hair out removes the target the next session needs and sets your progress back by a full cycle.

How many sessions for lip and chin?

Six to nine for 75 to 95 percent reduction. Coarse dark hair on lighter skin tends toward the low end. Hormonally driven growth tends toward the high end plus maintenance.

Is the chin harder than the lip?

Usually. Chin hair is more often hormonal, and hormonal follicles get reactivated by the same hormones that created them. The lip tends to finish cleanly. The chin tends to need a check in.

Will laser get rid of my dark upper lip shadow?

Partly. If the shadow is the hair itself, yes. If it is pigmentation in the skin, laser hair removal is the wrong tool and we will tell you that at consultation instead of taking your money.

Where we are and how to sort this out in person

We are at 1317 N Larrabee St, Chicago, IL 60610, in Old Town on the Near North Side. Clients come to us from Lincoln Park, the Gold Coast, River North, West Town, the West Loop, and the South Loop, most within a ten minute drive. The Sedgwick Brown Line stop is a four block walk, and there is free street and garage parking by the building. We covered the neighborhood logistics and the seasonal timing in our post on treatment near the Red Line.

We are open Monday through Saturday, 8 AM to 8 PM, by appointment only. No walk ins. We speak English, Romanian, and Russian. Our Google rating is 5.0 across 44 reviews.

The consultation is free and takes twenty minutes. We look at the area under magnification, tell you what color your hair actually is rather than what you think it is, run a patch test if your skin tone calls for one, and give you a written plan and a real price. About one in ten consultations ends with us recommending something other than booking, and if threading is the right answer for your hair, you will hear that from us and walk out owing nothing.

Call (252) 557-7113, or book a consultation online.

Related reading: laser hair removal for the lip and chin, facial laser hair removal in Chicago, and laser vs waxing.

Valeria Tartacovschi is a cofounder of V&P Laser Hair Removal & Skin Care in Old Town, Chicago. Treatments at V&P are performed by licensed Family Nurse Practitioners on a Candela GentleMax Pro Plus. This article is general information about hair removal options and is not medical advice for your individual situation. Prices listed were current as of August 2026 and are published in full on our prices page.