Depends drastically on the person. I'll note that I focus primarily on electrolysis because I like the precision and the fact that it has the same success rate for every type of hair / skin.

Nothing happens overnight, and anyone who promises a quick fix is lying to you to get your money or is simply uninformed.

We're at the mercy of hair growth cycles; the hair you see growing on someone's body at the current moment could be only 1/5 - 1/4 of the potentially active follicles. Each follicle goes through a lifecycle of growth and shedding, but these lifespans overlap. To see every active follicle on someone's target area will take up to a year or more.

The larger clinic I work at divides the face into vertical strips about 1.5" wide, and we clear one of those strips per session (~2-4h) and then loop back to treat the regrowth and follicle we ignored on the previously treated areas. re: ignored follicles, a caveat is that we take care to not treat too many follicles close to one another, since the density of follicles creates a risk of overtreatment (skin damage, pitting, various other bad scenarios) if we just go full hog and zap every follicle at once.

This can often be frustrating for the client since its not linear, but results in a better treatment in the long term. Sometimes for folks who experience a lot of dysphoria with their upper lip and "goatee" area hair we will prioritize that, but again it's not the most efficient long term solution for complete removal.

By the time we reach the other end of the face that we started on, the first area is usually pretty well taken care of with only the occasional stray stubborn hairs remaining. Then we proceed back across.

I'm still newer to the field so my speed isn't as great as some, but for someone who is faster, in the case of an extremely dense follicle pattern, could be upwards of 80 hours when all is said and done, possibly more for an extreme case. As you do more sessions the amount of time it takes for clearances and the amount of time between sessions will drastically reduce. So yeah, this is a 12-18 month journey.

If I had to recommend a SPEED CLEAR ASAP route, for a candidate with pale skin and dark hair it would probably be a lot more efficient to start with laser and then bring in electrolysis for the stubborn hairs. Unfortunately for friends with more melanin in their skin the efficacy of laser is reduced a lot.

So yeah I don't have good news.