Hello! I started laser hair removal around April last year; my cheeks and neck have been free of any hair whatsoever after 4/5 sessions. Sadly, the upper lip and chin always end up having regrowth, so I've had 6 sessions there. The machine used on me was the Alexandrite... Supposedly ideal for fair skin and dark hair. However, I my last two treatments on the upper lip + chin have been with the YAG; typically this machine is reserved for darker skin types, but because of its longer wavelength, it's supposedly more effective on the upper lip and chin, due to the hair being deeper?

I had my last session 2 weeks ago so I'm still shedding (YAG takes a while longer)...  I have only about a dozen stray hairs after weeks of not shaving, but what bothers me is that if I look really close, beard shadow is perceptible... Like tiny patches of blue tint... Yet no hair is growing? Why would this be? Is the hair active already after just two weeks? Is it dead and trapped under the skin to be rejected overtime? Did the laser fail and only weaken these hairs? I have no idea what is going on...
Before I went in for my last appointment, I didn't have many hairs growing and the ones that were seemed kind of fine/thin (I'm really light-skinned with dark hair), yet I went in to get my upper lip lasered because of the annoying hints of blue on the area...

Is it time for me to just switch to electrolysis? I'm sincerely worried about not being able to, since there's not even any hair growing on these tiny spots where it seems like I have shadow!

Been obsessing and worrying over this to the point of losing sleep... Hope someone out there can help =/
Edit: I forgot to mention I occasionally each a little on the treated areas... I think that's related to shedding...

Same issue here, Mermaid.  Five sessions of laser and the upper lip and chin still show signs of some dark hair, but it's not "hair" as such; more like tiny black dots underneath the skin that don't seem to grow.  And it leaves a bit of a beard shadow.

Hmmm.  I have one more session of laser, then I'm moving on to electrolysis.  Absolutely no idea what to do about those black dots.  Perhaps they'll disappear with time, or if they're slow-growing hairs they'll protrude at some point and into the hands of the electrologist.  It's nothing that light foundation can't cover up, but for those days when I don't want to wear any makeup, it's a bit of an easy sign that I'm not like the other girls in the supermarket.

I'm not an expert on the process, but it may be that the blueish shadow is due to some follicles going into their resting phase, with the hair visible below skin level, but neither growing nor detached.

You would probably need to wait to see whether these hairs start growing again, and in any case, if there is no hair protruding from the skin I'd imagine that electrolysis would not be recommended.

One thing I had to be reminded of is that even cis women can have a little bit of "mustache shadow" - if the hairs themselves aren't perceptible yet, you  may not be able to tell the difference between thick masculine beard hairs and the light downy upper lip hair that cis women get. (My wife now has more upper lip shadow than I do... but mine isn't zero either.) Also, if you only notice when you're practically using a magnifying glass, you might just be harder on yourself than anyone else will be.