The past couple of weeks I’ve been talking about the layers of aging that can make your face look older than it has to. Read my first post and second post on the subject to get caught up, and get ready for the next layer: environmental damage.
The Third Layer: Sun and Environmental Damage
All of the changes to your skin, from silky softness to all of those lines and wrinkles – not to mention brown spots and broken blood vessels – are all about a layer of aging that is the skin. We are talking not just about skin surface cells, but the full collagen thickness of the skin as well, giving back the health of the whole skin surface. Regeneration of skin cells and skin collagen is all of what treatment is about.
So let’s talk a bit about Layered Light for Lines and Wrinkles. The biggest breakthrough here was probably over 20 years in the making, it did begin with sanding, then chemical peels, and then laser peels of all kinds, and then how to do treatment with pixels of laser energy was discovered, and what a difference that has made. We are not talking about just waving a laser over the skin and you are “recovered,” but we are talking about using higher energy pixels of laser energy to remodel and regenerate deeper skin collagen and skin surface cells.
Your appearance after treatment is one of redness, and some swelling and shedding that takes about a week to 10 days to recover from. I would ask you as the patient to choose your physician wisely because skill does matter. As a board-certified dermatologist in Portland myself, and I would certainly only choose a physician board certified only in dermatology or plastic surgery. A “weekend course” trains no one for this procedure, and remember the laser is not doing the treatment – it is very much still your choice of physician. The combinations of lasers that are possible with our Layered Light for Lines, Wrinkles, and Sun Aging, are almost endless: IPL, Cool Breeze, Fraxel Dual 1550 and 1927 and Photodynamic Therapy (PDT).