Ulike Air 10 review: zero pain on my beard line, but it refuses to fire everywhere

The Ulike Air 10 is the first IPL handset I have used on my own face that did not make me flinch once — and it is also the first one that has flatly refused to work on parts of that same face.

Watch the full video review on YouTube.

Why I bought a second IPL device

I already owned an SKG IPL handset. The problem is that it officially is not meant for a man's face or neck, and those are exactly the two areas I wanted it for: the fine hairs above my beard line, and the patch under my jaw on the neck. Using a device outside what the manufacturer rates it for, on your own face, is not a risk I wanted to take.

The Air 10 is FDA-cleared and its documentation does cover the face. Ulike also sells a men's model, the Ulike X, which was sold out when I ordered — it is still showing sold out on their site as I write this — so I went with the Air 10, which is the unisex flagship.

This is a first-session review. I have used it once, properly, across several areas. That means I can tell you exactly how it feels, how it behaves and where it fails, but I cannot yet tell you how well it works, because nobody can after one session.

The ice cooling is not a marketing line

This is the part I did not expect to be the story, and it is.

The moment the sapphire window touched my skin, it was cold in a way I have not felt from a grooming device. Not cool — cold. It felt like I had put an ice cube on my face and left it there. When I pulled the device away, the window itself had fogged over, and condensation had gathered on the glass. That fog is in the video and in the photo above; it is not a lighting trick.

I actually tried to measure it with an infrared thermometer on camera and got nowhere useful, because the light bounces off that glossy window and the reading is meaningless. So I will not give you a number of my own. Ulike's product page quotes a 65°F contact temperature, and I can only tell you that it behaves consistently with something that cold.

There is a flip side. There is no way to dial the cooling back, and there were moments where it went past "comfortable" into genuinely unpleasant for me. If you live somewhere cold, or you just do not like the sensation, know that this is not adjustable.

My first attempt did nothing, and that was my fault

I started on my arm and deliberately did not shave first, because I wanted to show hairs reacting on camera. Nothing happened. I went from normal to high, high to SHR, and the hairs just sat there.

That is not a device fault, it is a me fault, and I want to be straight about it because I got it wrong on camera. IPL needs the light to reach the follicle under the skin. If there is a forest of surface hair in the way, the energy is spent on the wrong thing. Ulike's own instructions say to shave anything longer than about 2 mm first, and the box includes a wet-shave razor for exactly this reason.

Once I shaved the beard line and neck properly, the device behaved completely differently.

Zero pain on the beard line and neck

This is the claim I can stand behind after one session: on my skin, on high mode, on my face and neck, I felt nothing.

Not "a mild sting". Nothing. The only sensation was the cold, and the only reason I knew a flash had fired was the sound. I ran it along the fine line above my beard, down onto the neck, and across the cheeks, and at no point did I get the snap-of-a-rubber-band feeling that people describe with IPL. On one or two passes near the end I noticed a faint something — a sense that an event had happened — and that was as far as it went.

I think the cooling is doing most of that work. It is numbing the skin before the flash lands. Whether that holds for someone with more sensitive skin than mine, I obviously cannot say, but if fear of pain is what has kept you off IPL, this is the device that addresses it directly.

One practical annoyance: the status indicators are dim. With the goggles on I could not reliably see whether the device was armed or which mode I was in, and the goggles that ship in the box are noticeably less opaque than the pair that came with my SKG. I ended up removing them and closing my eyes on each flash instead, which is not something I would recommend as a habit.

Where it simply refuses to fire

Here is the thing that will decide it for some people.

I have pigmented patches on both cheeks. On those patches, the device would not flash at all. Not weakly — not at all. I dropped from SHR to high, from high to normal, and there is nothing below normal — Fast is a speed setting for covering large areas, not a gentler one. Move an inch onto clear skin and it fires instantly; move back onto the patch and it stops.

My reading is that this is the SkinSensor doing exactly what it is designed to do. IPL targets melanin, and a darker patch absorbs more energy, so the sensor is refusing rather than risking a burn. That is the correct behaviour and I would rather have it than not. But you should go in knowing that the areas you most want treated may be precisely the areas it declines to treat, and there is no override.

The same logic is why Ulike's own page says IPL is not suitable for very dark skin tones and is least effective on blonde, grey and red hair. That is not a caveat I am inventing — it is on their product page, with a compatibility checker.

Build, modes and what is in the box

The hardware is good. The shell feels solid, the buttons have a proper click, and nothing about it feels like a $259 device pretending to be more. I have no hardware complaint after the first session.

There are four modes. Fast is a rapid flash for touch-ups over large areas. Normal is the balanced setting. High is for thicker, coarser hair. SHR is the strongest, and Ulike rates it at 26 J per four-pulse burst. The manual's own guidance is that the face gets normal or high, not SHR — SHR is for armpits, chest, bikini line. I used high on my face because my hair is thick and normal was not enough for it.

Two features worth knowing about. SkinSensor adjusts the flash intensity to your skin tone automatically in normal and high mode, which is the thing refusing to fire on my cheek patches. AutoGlide turns on with a two-second hold and then flashes on a timer as long as the device detects skin, so on legs or arms you glide instead of pressing a button a hundred times. It stops the moment you lift off.

Also worth noting: this is a mains-powered handset, not a battery one. The adapter in my box is rated 90 W, which tells you something about how much energy the thing is putting out.

The box has the handset, goggles, a pouch, the power adapter, a wet-shave razor and the paperwork.

The schedule, and what "permanent" actually means

Ulike's manual asks for three sessions a week for the first four weeks, then from week five you drop to roughly once every two weeks or once a month depending on how your hair grows back.

That maintenance phase is the part I want to be blunt about, because the marketing language around this whole category is misleading. I have had clinic laser sessions. They did not get rid of my hair. What they did was lengthen the gap between having to deal with it. That is what IPL does too — it reduces density and slows regrowth, so the upkeep gets cheaper, not zero.

If you buy this expecting your hair to disappear and never come back, you will be disappointed. If you buy it to go from shaving your neck constantly to touching it up once a month, that is a realistic outcome and it is the reason I bought mine.

Who I think it is for

Buy it if you are a man who wants a beard line, neck or cheeks cleaned up and has run into the same wall I did — that most of these handsets are not rated for a man's face. Buy it if pain is the thing that has kept you away from IPL, because on my skin, on the highest setting I used, there was none.

Do not buy it if you have a darker skin tone or light, grey or red hair; check Ulike's own compatibility tool before you spend anything. Do not buy it if you have significant pigmentation exactly where you want to treat, because the sensor may simply refuse. And do not buy it expecting to be done in a month.

I will report back after four and eight weeks, because that is the only honest way to judge whether it actually works.