Conclusive Review of Philips Lumea Prestige 2021

For a very long period of time, Philips Lumea Prestige has been occupying the hair removal market. Frankly, I consider the Philips Lumea to be among the elite devices that provide the best and most effective at home hair removal treatments.

There are faster devices such as the superfast SS Bare, more powerful devices such as the famous Tria Laser 4X, but none of them combines all good features together with the way Philips Lumea Prestige models do.

Moreover, Philips Lumea Prestige is ranked #1 on our list of all IPL & Laser Hair Removal devices.

How did Prestige rank on the top of the mountain? I conducted series of experiments, research, and read through hundreds of customer reviews, to provide you with the most conclusive review of the Prestige.

What Is Philips Lumea Prestige?

Philips Lumea Prestige is the best IPL hair removal device since 2017, it provides results like no other IPL device.

It’s not only about the results, the Prestige ranks high in nearly every important criteria used to judge IPL devices, starting with the design, and ending with the ultimate results.

No matter what we say about other products and how amazing and effective they are, Philips Lumea Prestige is out of scope.

Prestige’s Skin & Hair Types

Our top-rated one works on the widest range of skin tones: White/very white-blond, ivory, beige, brown, and dark brown ones. So, it nearly works on all skin tones but brownish-black ones.
Moreover, as with all IPL hair removal devices, it’s suitable for blond, brown, dark brown, and black hair colors. It’s not suitable for light blond, red, white or grey ones.

Philips Lumea Prestige Features

Philips Lumea Prestige BRI956 is the 2017 Beauty Award Winner. Moreover, it has the Green Logo for being environmentally friendly and reducing cost and energy consumption, with the help of those features:

High Safety Standards

The Philips Lumea Prestige provides the highest standards for safety, it uses an integrated safety system that prevents unintentional flashing, besides the SmartSkin sensor that automatically selects the power level that suits your skin tone.

With that, comes 5 different power levels that you can use depending on your tolerance, and/or different body parts.

Furthermore, the Prestige has an integrated UV filter that protects the skin from UV light produced by the device.

In conclusion, multiple sets of layers were produced inside the Lumea Prestige, only for your own safety.

Effective IPL Technology

Not every Device built on IPL Technology produces the same power or intensity. Let alone, provide the same quality of results.

However, when examining the strength and effectiveness of IPL technology used, the Philips Lumea Prestige provided results in better timings than most IPL & laser devices.

It’s not a matter of speed or power, it’s a matter of effectiveness, and the IPL technology Prestige uses, helped efficiently with that.

Ergonomic Design

The Design of Philips Lumea Prestige is bigger (560g) than the normal IPL devices you see in the market, and this is a two-edged sword.

This made the device heavier, but also provided it with enough space inside, to contain parts that aid with the effectiveness.

Furthermore, it’s gun-shaped, which means you’ll be able to aim it at any part you’d want to treat, with absolute comfort and ease.

Informative Manual

When you dive deeper into the Ultimate List of All IPL & Laser Hair Removal Devices, you’ll notice that many devices have problems with their manuals, some are translated wrongfully, others provide vague instructions.

With Philips Lumea Prestige, this is not the case, the User Manual you receive with the device provides informative guidance, and answers nearly any question you have about the use of the device.

Additionally, helpful charts, direct instructions, and detailed pieces of information are all around this manual, but if you still have any questions, our comment section below is open and we’ll have your answers as soon as 24 hours max.

Fast Results

The Philips Lumea Prestige, with the effective IPL technology, can provide up to 92% hair reduction, in just 2-3 treatment sessions, that’s 4-6 weeks only.

at home hair removal requires patience, and most devices will require more weeks to provide noticeable results. in contrast, only 4 sessions are required to achieve full hair removal results.

Just repeat the process every 1-2 months, to maintain results for as long s you’d want to enjoy your hair-free experience.

Fast Sessions

As we continue our examination of the Philips Lumea Prestige, it took my colleague & me around 47 minutes (for me) and 51 minutes (for her) to finish a full body treatment.

However, we have a small trick we’ll tell you about in the “Our Experience” section down below.

This is considerably fast compared to any device outside the top5 devices on our ranking system, as most of the other devices allow you to conclude a full-body treatment in more than 1 hour.

Four Intelligent Attachments

We talked about how special the Philips Lumea Prestige is, but what’s astonishing about it is the ability to cover various body parts with a “special touch.”

For instance, only a handful of IPL devices provide attachments with the device, as the rest create a single “head” to the device that should suit all body parts, which isn’t as efficient as we’d want it to be.

The Efficiency and variety-providing is a Prestige special, as it comes with 4 intelligent attachments, each is suited to treat a special body part.

Those attachments cover the Armpit, Bikini, Body, and Face individually, and they were created to suit the skin anatomy of each part.

+15 Years of Continuous Treatments

If you buy a relatively pricey product, you don’t want it to die or stop working by the 10th or even the 50th treatment session.

Philips Lumea Prestige has 250.000 flash lamps, viable to treat around 1,000,000 cm2 of your skin area, as each flash covers 4 cm2.

Additionally, a single full-body treatment only requires covering 5.000 cm2 of skin area, that’s 200 full-body treatments. Quick math: touch-up once a month is enough to maintain hair-free results, so you have around 190 monthly sessions with this device. (-10 sessions for initial sessions)

Quick math continues: 190 months is nearly 15 years, and that’s how long a Philips Lumea Prestige can last.

Moreover, you don’t need to buy anything additional after buying the device, you got everything you want in there to proceed to treatments.

Works both Corded & Cordless

Only 3 out of our top10 list of all laser hair removal devices can work both corded & cordless. Two of those 3 are Philips Lumea 9000 Series and Philips Lumea Prestige.

Moreover, only 6 of our whole list can work cordless too, this means Philips Lumea products are 33% of IPL devices that have this ability.

Is it really important to work cordless? Yes, it is. Imagine the need to do a session away from everything, even from an electricity source, that’s how good this option can actually be.

Furthermore, busy women with a lot of flights to catch, rarely find the space and time to take care of their hair, and most of the time a 15-30 minute session can do the work anywhere she travels.

Helpful Application

Need to organize your sessions, arrange a treatment session for weeks without worrying you’ll forget or miss your timings, Philips Lumea built an App that helps with that.

It’s 100% synchronized with the device itself, and its main task is to help with scheduling.

Actually, there’s not much that this application can do aside from that, so, once you finish your initial treatment sessions in the first couple of months, the app becomes useless.

Pros & Cons of Philips Lumea Prestige

Even ranked #1 doesn’t mean the device doesn’t have any cons, here’s a list of Philips Lumea Prestige’s Pros & cons:

Pros: 

• Works Corded and Cordless
• Fast Treatment Sessions
• Up to 90% hair reduction in 3-4 sessions
• Long Lamp Lifetime
• Power and Effective Sessions
• 250,000 flashes enough for more than 15 years of use
• 4 precise attachments tailored to acclimate to each body area’s curve
• Effective on the widest range of skin tones
• As Safe As an IPL Device can be
• 30-day money-back guarantee

Cons:

• NOT FDA-Cleared
• A Bit Bulky & Heavy (560g)
• Pricey

Philips Lumea Prestige Models

The Distinguished Philips Lumea has 5 different models, and the aforementioned BRI956 is the best of them all. The other Lumea Prestige Models are:

• BRI956
• BRI954
• BRI953
• BRI950
• BRI949

The main difference between those models is the body attachments: The BRI956 and BRI949 editions come with 3 different attachments, for Body/Face/bikini and armpit.

However, The BRI954, BRI953, and BRI950 come with 2 attachments, for Body/Face, but without the bikini and armpit attachment.

There’s also another difference in color between those models: BRI954 is purple, BRI953 is silver, and BRI950 is pink, while those three come with the same attachments.

Philips Lumea Prestige Price

The Price of Lumea Prestige BRI956 is around £499 (~$680). You may consider this pricey, but it’s well worth it if you compare it to the amazing features it provides.

Make sure to check regularly for discounts and sales on the retailer and official websites.

Our Philips Lumea Prestige Rating

In our list of all at home hair removal devices, the Prestige ranked #1, due to scoring high in our points’ based system, and this is how much it earned:

The only +90% ranked device on our list, has achieved this ultimate rank via high effectiveness, complete variety, and superb amazon ratings.

Therefore, the Philips Lumea Prestige earned an overall score of 92.4%

The Full Mark in Effectiveness comes easy with 90% hair reduction in as fast as 3-4 weeks only.

We talked in length about the benefit of intelligent attachments, with 4 of those suiting the different needs for treating special body parts, it’s well earned to say the device scored full mark in Variety.

Prestige is too pricey for an IPL device, as $700 isn’t easily affordable for all women, this has hit the Price rating to 25% only.

People search for Philips Lumea Prestige tens of thousands of times each month, and that’s only via google alone, let alone other websites, granting the device a full mark in popularity.

The device obtained a 4.6/5 stars rating on Amazon, which is converted to 92% in that criteria.

By the time I publish this review, thousands have already rated the device on Amazon, so, it deserves a full mark here as well.

Philips Lumea Prestige BRI949 is ranked #1 on Amazon by the “IPL Hair Removal Systems”, and that’s obviously a full mark in category rank.

With an astonishing conquering of the market since 2017, the device is old enough to receive full mark in Age.

Our Experience with Philips Lumea Prestige

After we ranked the devices and settled for The Philips Lumea Prestige to be the best Device, we bought the device and attempted to test it, to provide you with an in-person review of the experience you’ll be having with the Prestige.

First, you should know that this is not a sponsored unboxing or revealing of the device, this is solely for the sake of enriching your knowledge of the device, before obtaining it.

Unboxing

As my colleague @shouq and I started the unboxing of the device, we immediately noticed how heavy the box can be.

You can see in the picture above, it’s a well-built box with the device, power cable, and attachments. Underneath them, we found the user manual and the app info slip.

Use

Shouq & I took everything out of the box and surfed through the user manual. It’s as detailed as we needed it to be.

Thorough instructions, helpful and detailed charts, in addition to a good set of dos and don’ts.

As we plugged in the cable, I excused myself into the room and started to treat my arms and legs.

The flashes were too fast you could sometimes miss seeing them, I felt that it’s a good sign, my sessions wouldn’t take too long.

and that’s what happened, I carried out a full body treatment immediately, excluding the face & genital area, as Prestige doesn’t work on those parts for men. The whole session took me 41 minutes.

However, that was not a consecutive 41 minutes. The device ran into unexpected heating at around 20 minutes, and I had to put it off until it stopped heating, then after 30 minutes, I continued the session.

Be careful! if you continue to use it after it became hotter than usual, the device may shut down by itself due to heating!

After cooling it down, you’ll have to press 20 seconds on the power button to reset its settings, then you’ll be able to use it again.

Cordless

My colleague Shouq decided to test the device working cordless, and her experience isn’t as expected.

The manual said that after a full charge for hours, the Prestige can work up to 30 consecutive minutes. That happened only during the initial 3 sessions.

During the ensuing sessions, its power wore off around minutes 14-15, and that decline continued to be the same for the remaining sessions.

Results

Shouq reported that she received the promised results, the hair grew too slow after the 4th week. She concluded, “All I need now is some touch-ups here and there, all good my friend, all good.”

Older Philips Lumea Prestige Models

The Lumea Prestige has been evolving in its models for years, starting with good-old SC2005, up until the BRI956.

The older models of Philips Lumea Prestige included:

• Prestige SC2005
• Prestige SC2007
• Prestige SC2009

However, Philips Lumea stopped producing them for a long time already, but if you still want to know more about them, here you are.

Philips Lumea BRI vs SC

The Philips Lumea Prestige BRI956 comes corded & cordless, but the Philips Lumea Prestige SC2009 works corded only.

Prestige BRI956 fires fast flashes that help shorten sessions’ duration, the Prestige SC2009 fires slower flashes that end up making the session last longer than it should.

The last main difference between Prestige BRI and Prestige SC is the modes. There are 2 modes for using the Prestige BRI, (Slide & Flash and Stamp & Flash).

However, for the SC models, there’s only the Stamp & Flash mode.

Collectively, The user experience with BRI956 is easier and faster than that with the SC2009 model.

Philips Lumea Prestige Customer Reviews

As the Prestige had thousands of customer reviews, we introduce you to one positive and 1 negative customer review, and the reasoning behind those two reviews, from our expert POV.

The prime time for the Philips Lumea Prestige was between 2017 and 2020, so we got you reviews from that era.

Positive Review

Grace T from the UK, bought it on 16^th December 2018, with snow-white skin and dark hair, and her experience with usual hair removal methods is tiring and doesn’t provide long-lasting results.

She said in her review, “no matter how many times I epilated, waxed, shaved, etc nothing ever helped. I was fed up with my ingrown hairs and HATED every aspect of my body that grew thick hair.”

However, that changed when she started her treatments with the Philips Lumea Prestige, she stressed.

“Now, having completed 3 treatments over 6 weeks, I am so pleased with results! 90% hair reduction in my bikini area, and 70-80% on my legs,” Grace said.

This is the dream for any IPL device user, to achieve results in the promised timeline.

She concluded her review, “I don’t know how it would be for anyone. For once, I am looking forward to baring my skin to the summer sun!”

Negative Review

Nearly a month earlier, an anonymous user from the UK purchased the Prestige but his/her experience wasn’t as pleasant as Grace’s.

They said, “It did start reducing my body hair significantly. Not completely – I still had to shave in between the sessions but it was getting less and less each time.”

However, they attempted to continue the treatment, but the device stopped working.

“I pressed the turn on button and can’t even select an intensity. It just won’t work,” they continued.

The review ended with a despairing comment, stating, “If it was gonna stop working after not using for a while I should have been warned!”

Reading our conclusive review maybe would’ve saved their experience with the device, as this takes us back to “our experience” section.

If you use the device for more than 20 consecutive minutes, it’ll start heating, and if that continues, the device would need to be “Reset” to continue working.

That would’ve been the warning they needed, indeed.

Philips Lumea Prestige FAQ

Conclusion

Ranking #1 on our list of all at home laser hair removal devices, the Philips Lumea Prestige out ranks, and outperforms all the IPL & Laser hair removal devices on the market.

Therefore, our deep research on those devices resulted in admitting that Philips Lumea Prestige BRI956, provides safety, speed, effectiveness, long-lasting results, and cost-efficient option for women seeking IPL hair removal at home.

Philips Lumea Prestige has the best IPL hair removal devices occupying the market today. So we are talking about an investment in a lifelong product here. That’s why we rated them as our top devices – BRI956 in particular.

For comparisons between the best at home laser hair removal devices, check our full list in the link below.