IPL is the first medical cosmetic treatment I ever had. It did wonders for my complexion, toning down my pink cheeks, shrinking my broken capillaries and erasing my sun damage.
I remember doing a clinic with dermatologist Dr. Rosenthal when I was an intern. He pointed out to the patient all of the telangiectasias (broken capillaries) that I had on my cheeks.
How glad I am that I don’t have those any more.
Before IPL treatment
BEFORE
This isn’t me but it gives you a good idea of the kind of results you can get with an IPL photofacial.
After IPL treatment
AFTER
See how much brighter her skin looks? The sun damage on her upper lip was creating such a shadow that it almost looked like a mustache. After the treatment, her skin looks clear and radiant.
This article is reprinted from Advanced Rejuvenation’s newsletter of January 21, 2009. If you would like to subscribe, click here.
It has immediate effects (within 5 minutes) of relaxing the small facial muscles that cause wrinkles and filling the wrinkles with hyaluronic acid filling spheres.
Hyaluronic acid is a sugar that we make in our bodies whose function is to hold moisture where we want it. It is the major component of a number of injectable dermal fillers like Restylane, Juvederm and Teosyal. In TNS Line Refine, it comes as lotion that you apply to your skin.
These photos show the before image and 5 minutes after the first application of TNS Line Refine to a 50 year old woman.
Before applying TNS Line Refine
5 minutes after applying TNS Line Refine
As you use this product every day over time, you get some very nice long-term effects. TNS Line Refine contains CoEnzyme Q10 which helps to prevent free radical damage. It also contains certain peptides that help to stimulate the body’s repair mechanisms at the cellular level and promote collagen, elastin and new skin cell formation.
We have been very impressed with the product ourselves. And we’ve had good feedback from everyone who bought it.
This article is reprinted from our newsletter of January 2, 2009. To subscribe to our newsletter, please clickhere.
The last US presidential election focused a lot of attention on what the various political women had done to improve their appearance. I heard rumors that Hillary had had some work done but I hadn’t seen any images that were close enough that I could really see a difference.
(Source of Before Image here; After picture was taken at the Glamour Magazine Women of the Year 2008 event.)
I did some searching and came up with these images. The one on the left dates from December 2007. I was shocked at how crepey her skin was. And look at the loss of volume in her cheeks! Her forehead is furrowed and her eyelids are very crepey.
The photo on the right was taken in November 2008. The volume is miraculously restored to her face. This can be achieved with Sculptra or fat grafting. It would depend on how much downtime Hillary could afford — Sculptra would be more gradual but has minimal downtime.
This effect could also be achieved with dermal fillers but it would take a lot of syringes to get these results. However, the results are instantaneous so Hillary might have gone for it.
The texture of her skin is much improved but still lined. This suggests to me that she has undergone fractional laser resurfacing, which would be a Pixel treatment here.
I also suspect she has had her upper lids lifted (blepharoplasty).
I can’t tell whether or not she had some filler in her lips, given the difference in facial expression. If she did, it was done with a very light and subtle hand.
To me, this is the epitome of looking great without looking “done.” Hillary Clinton is such a vibrant woman. Her “after” appearance reflects the inner woman.
Ask anyone what a facelift is and they can probably tell you.
But what about a nonsurgical or volumizing facelifts, a Liquid Facelift, a FavorLift, a Voluma Facelift or a Facelift in a Bottle?
What exactly are those? Are they all the same?
In the past, plastic surgeons treated the effects of aging with a facelift. But by removing so called “excess skin”, they left many with the telltale swept back or stretched face. Your face looked tighter but not necessarily younger.
These days doctors look at the effects of aging as made up of three parts:
Surface weathering and mottling due to environment and lifestyle
Sagging and bagging of aging skin
Loss of volume caused by loss of fat padding and decreased collagen production
All of the nonsurgical facelift treatments focus on restoring volume. They use various compounds like Sculptra, Juvederm, Restylane and Artecoll. The trouble is many people don’t understand the difference between the different products and use the terms interchangeably.
Sculptra or poly-L-lactic acid. It stimulates the body to produce collagen, giving you, in time, a fuller and more youthful appearance. Sculptra takes 2 to 6 treatments over a period of months for best effect. It lasts 2 to 3 years. It is excellent for restoring volume all over the face including the temples. This restoration puts the eyes and nose back into proportion with the rest of the face. This is often known as a Liquid Facelift or Facelift in a Bottle.
Teosyal, Juvederm and Restylane are hyaluronic acid gels. These are fillers often used to fill in deep wrinkles, which does improve appearance. In volumizing facelifts, the product is placed under the skin close to the bone where fat loss has occurred. This lifts the skins, smoothing it out and restores a more youthful appearance. The effects are immediate and recovery time minimal.
While hyaluronic acid occurs naturally in the body, Juvederm is a more purified form of hyaluronic acid than Restylane and consequently less likely to cause a reaction upon injection. These deep injection treatments go by such names as Voluma Facelift, Tri Site Bolus or as we call it, Instant Cheek Restoration. The effects last much longer than when used to fill expression lines or wrinkles up to several years.
Key issues to consider are the doctor’s technique and artistic eye. The practitioner must understand the 3d modelling of the face in general AND how to correct what ails YOU. Too much revolumizing in the wrong place can make you look “done”, if not downright strange. Improper placement can give the appearance of beads under the surface or make you look a bit cat-like.
Another issue that is rarely talked about is the gauge of the needle used for injections. Restylane SubQ (used in the Voluma facelift) is injected with a 16 gauge needle. Juvederm and Sculptra are injected with a much finer needle, a 26 or 27 gauge. A 16 gauge needle is big enough to leave a little scar. Using a finer needle also allows product to be placed in smaller doses in spots.
Here is the only video I could find on YouTube that shows Restylane SubQ being injected in the cheeks. It’s from South America and the quality is not great but it gives you an idea of what I am talking about.
This video shows a cheek augmentation procedure with Juvederm. Note the fine 27 gauge needle.
Many of the names you read about are used by doctors to personalize the treatment they offer their patients and train other doctors to practise. Don’t worry too much about a specific name. Do your homework and find out exactly what product the doctor is using and how they are injecting it.
The old understanding of facial aging was that the skin and muscles of face become stretched and lax so the treatment of choice was to tighten them up. The ideal way to tighten the skin and muscles was to cut out the excess and pull the remainder tighter, in other words, to do a facelift.
We have a much better understanding of facial aging now. We know that the support structures of the face, the bone, muscle and deep fat layers, are shrinking as we age. If you pull the skin tighter over a shrinking framework, you get a smaller and more gaunt-looking face. I always get a picture in my mind of Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, whose face got smaller as she aged.
This article from the Style blog of The Plain Dealer does a really good job of explaining how restoring volume to face does a much better job of making look younger but still look like yourself.
“You don’t want to change your looks,” says Dr. Anthony Griffin, director of the Beverly Hills Cosmetic Surgery Institute. “And actresses and celebrities really don’t want to do that, though some inadvertently have.
“Face-lifts make the face tighter, and when you pull on the skin, it gets flatter. You don’t look like yourself anymore. Some actresses we’ve seen pictures of have had disastrous results.” …
“Face-lifts change the whole ratio and proportions of the facial features, which is why some actresses are hardly recognizable,” Griffin says, who predicts that in 10 or 15 years, face-lifts will be passe and rarely done.
Using dermal fillers, like Teosyal and Juvederm, and volumizers, like Sculptra, creates a very natural look. My clients tell me they look in the mirror and remember when they used to look like this.
Here is an example of how Sculptra builds up volume around the mouth:
These photos show how restoring volume in the midface (the cheeks below the eyes and above the base of the nose) really restores a younger appearance to the face:
You can look like a more youthful version of yourself without resorting to the knife. Each treatment has advantages and disadvantages but they are both a lot less risky than having surgery.
Neither Teosyal nor Sculptra is permanent but a facelift isn’t permanent either. You generally need to have another facelift about every 10 years.
I’m really excited about the natural results I can achieve with Teosyal and Sculptra, and the longevity of these products. The injection techniques that I use can last for several years.
I put up an article with Before & After pictures over on my own blog about one of the first signs of aging and how we fixed it in about 15 minutes.
You’ll definitely want to be close to a mirror when you read the article to see if you have the same problem Laura did.
I’m really excited about this new technique. The doctor who pioneered it has patients that he treated over 7 years ago who have not needed a touch-up in that whole time. The results look really natural on both men and women.
ADDENDUM: I’ve put up another article with Before and After pictures showing how bagging lower lids can be treated with the same technique. You no longer need surgery to deal with bags under your eyes.
People often ask me what they should do to look 10 years younger. Of course, the advice varies from person to person depending on their specific needs. In this article, I’m going to lay out some general guidelines about what to fix in your face to look younger.
If you are the kind of person who never goes to the hairdresser, doesn’t wear makeup or hasn’t changed your makeup style since you were in your 20s, and only buys the most basic and functional clothes at WalMart, then the best thing you can do to look 10 years younger is put yourself in the hands of a good stylist for your hair, have a makeup lesson and let a sympathetic saleswoman at a good clothing store help you choose some clothes. You’ve put yourself on the back burner long enough! Now is the time to do something nice for yourself for a change.
If you’re keeping up with hair, makeup and clothes then you want to take a trip to the medical spa to find out what we can do for you.
The absolute bedrock, most important basic thing to do is to use good, medical-grade skincare products. Good skincare makes your skin look smoother and better; it improves the physiology of your skin so it is more tolerant of all of the usual environmental stresses that damage your skin, like pollution, UV rays and extreme temperatures. Our Vivier skincare products are really effective and cost about the same as the better drugstore brands so if you’ve been dabbling in various product lines with mediocre results, come and get something that really works.
After skincare, you want to think about your face’s texture, color, tightness and volume.
Texture includes things like old acne scars, crepe-like skin, roughness, blocked pores and bumps. My skin used to be so rough from sun damage that I gave up wearing makeup because it just wouldn’t go on right any more.
Color refers to the brown spots of sun damage or abnormal pigment and the redness of broken capillaries, environmental damage and rosacea. An uneven skintone adds 5 – 10 years to your face.
Tightness really means looking at whether you have sagging skin or not enough tightness. As we age, the quality and quantity of collagen goes down so our skin starts to sag as well as wrinkle.
Volume changes in the face include loss of volume or hollowing out of the face, as well as the volume changing position. Many of us find that our cheeks head towards our jowls as we age.
Take a good look at your face in the mirror. How even is your skintone? Does your skin look smooth? Are you pores enlarged? Is the fullest part of cheek up at your cheekbone or is it drifting south? Do you have hollow temples? Do you have jowls? Do you have a lot of lines in your lips or around your mouth?
You probably know which problem is aging your appearance the most or you can come and talk to me and I’ll give you my objective opinion.
The good news is that all of these problems can be fixed – without surgery! Wouldn’t you like to look in the mirror and see a face that looks as young as you feel inside? You will find your mood and energy level totally improve as you start looking better and better.
In future articles, I will write about each problem and the various treatments that can be done to fix them.
You can also see how her brown sun spots are fewer, smaller and lighter. The IPLs did that too. Catherine would need a few more IPLs to erase the brown spots completely.
Catherine’s skin looks smoother and more dewy. This is also called radiance. Radiance comes from the skincare products and the Pixel laser treatments.
Catherine’s face has slimmed down with her 15 pound weight loss but her cheeks haven’t flattened out. That’s because I injected some Teosyal dermal filler along her cheekbones to lift and volumize her cheeks. Putting filler in the cheeks helps to reduce the lines that bracket the mouth (nasolabial folds and marionette lines) and lifts jowls.
The frown lines on Catherine’s forehead were smoothed out with BOTOX® Cosmetic. She also got a bit of a brow lift with the botox but you can’t see it in this picture.
Catherine’s lips are plumped up just enough to smooth out the vertical lines using Teosyal KISS, a product I really like.
Another important point about Catherine’s face is that she continued her running during the makeover period and competed in a couple of races without getting tanned. Catherine was really diligent about applying her sunscreen.
Isn’t it exciting to see what a transformation can occur in just a 1-month period?
These are Catherine’s UV photos, the before on the left and today’s photo right. Yes, I know she looks a bit moribund but that is because ultraviolet light picks up different things from regular visible light.
If you watch crime shows like CSI, you know that UV light sees deeper into the skin, revealing sun damage that may not be visible on the surface. That’s what the brown spots are on Catherine’s skin.
You can see that we’ve reduced the size and number of brown spots with one month of treatments. The primary treatment responsible for this change is the IPL or Intense Pulsed Light treatment. The fractionated laser, the Pixel, also plays a role.
The skincare products helped too. Catherine was able to tolerate the Vitamin C serum with hydroquinone called SeeQuin by Vivier.
This is what Catherine’s skin looks like below the surface. Pretty good, eh? Wait until you see what it looks like in daylight. Stay tuned for the next article.
Just to recap, Claire Andrews, makeup specialist at Advanced Rejuvenation Medical Spa, is demonstrating a makeup application on Catherine while Catherine’s skin is red and rough from a fractionated laser treatment.
In Part 1, we saw how Claire handles the concealer and foundation using gloMinerals mineral makeup.
In Part 2, she applies color — blush, eyes, brows and lips — to complete a daytime look. You’ll see Claire demonstrating some of the techniques she discussed in her first video, particularly how to handle the bright blush colors that are fashionable now and how to get the current brow shape.
Part 3 will show how to convert the daytime look to a bit more drama for night.
Please go to 10yyb.com for the 2009 10 Years Younger in Burlington program.
The final results
You can see the full-length before and after pictures of Catherine by clicking here.
10 Years Younger in Burlington
2008: One applicant will be chosen to receive services over the course of a 1-month period from the folks listed in the left hand column.
The 1-month program is designed to transform the lucky recipient in appearance, attitude and fitness so she will truly feel 10 Years Younger.
I heard rumors that Hillary had had some work done but I hadn’t seen any images that were close enough that I could really see a difference. 
