Check This Mole Before You Have Laser or Cosmetic Treatments

Any moles that are enlarging, not a single color, have irregular boarders or bleed may be a sign of something more serious. You need medical evaluation and possibly a biopsy before you get any sort of laser or cosmetic treatment to be safe. Even if your mole doesn't look as angry as this one, it may be best to have some of the moles removed in your treatment areas before proceeding with cosmetic treatments. And this is additionally why you want to have a medical professional perform an evaluation on a regular basis.

Firm Up, Weight LIfting for the Skin? Not Exactly!

Can you skip fillers , lasers, ultrasound and heat treatments, and just do some heavy lifting to improve the facial physique? We have muscles in our face, so overall facial structure can be improved by some exercising, but as for the skin itself there's no current plan to be able to firm it up just in the gym! How firm your skin is basically the same question as to how much collagen, thickness and elasticity you skin has. And the exact nature of your skin elasticity aslo has to do with you skin tone, too much DNA breakdown and the skin isn't healthy. We want to help our patients understand the principles behind skin care, and understanding what makes the skin firm is important. Firmness of skin has to some extent become a marking term without a real definition. As your skin care advisor what we want for your skin is a natural amount of skin rebound, appropriate skin tightness, overall good skin tone; and all of these components are just a bit different than just the skin elasticity. So building the elastin or collagen fibers through the use of appropriate treatments or products will help firmness. The best firm skin will have both emollient properties and, what we've been talking a lot about, high water content and stay moisturized. So again, making your skin firm and making it moist are really doing the same thing, we want to make your skin full of water! And just like we want to strengthen the skin, but not exactly put you on a weight lifting plan, we also want to make your skin full of water, and not only drinking a glass of water will do that!

Exfolliation

Proper exfoliation is excellent for your skin. Too much exfoliation is drying and irritating and can even lead to breakouts. Exfoliation keeps the top layer of the skin fresh and more porous. Our skin has a top layer called. stratum corneum, for proper penetration into the skin a product has to be designed to be able to penetrate the skin, and so exfoliation will help products penetrate this stratum corneum. Without being able to penetrate the stratum corneum layer of the skin your skin care products cannot work.Then you become a candidate for products that can exfoliate, to help your skin heal. The best  products to use are those that exfoliate by accelerating skin turn over. The rentinol class of products do this. If you need additional exfoliation, then profession abrasion or peeling may be indicated. You winter skin may need more exfoliation than your summer skin, and if you have been ill or have had a poor diet your regimen may need to change which is when it is a good time discuss exfoliation with your skin care professional.

Maximizing Moisture in Your Skin

Getting the most out of your skin care products is tricky and we want to help you get the most cost effective products. As a general rule you will want to balance aesthetics and goals and we utilize an ingredient approach: each ingredient we recommend for our patients has a role. We want to also discuss options and determine if you as patients have to like it and have it feel good, and finally does it really meet the need we are trying to accomplish for your skin. The first step is sunscreen, after that we want to talk about moisturizing your skin., and we use the science behind the study of skin to determine what we are going to recommend. We have a progressive dehydration of skin cells as they progress from lower to upper layers, which is why just exfoliating improves the overall moisture content of your skin. Our skin has a substance filligrin is part of the skin cells and it forms a natural moisturizing factor. Naturally moist skin is about is 30% water, and water is held in to the skin by that gorgeous plump lipids (fat laden!) upper layer. When we want to improve your skin, we make an assessment of whether we recommend trying to supplement or replace the architecture. Dry skin has a number of components we are trying to combat:: it may contain malnourished cells, odd excreted proteins, the layers may loose their natural organization, lipid layers may be missing altogether and these are just some of the things we can improve with proper skin care. The body can moisturize itself, and when we recommend products we want to aid that process. Did you know you lose a lot of water, medically about through the skin we lose about 12-14 g/cm2 of water per minute! Effective products to stop this rapid rate of loss from our skin might include petrolatum products for instance: reduces water loss by 99% (and you need at least 1% water loss for skin to repair). Many products do have various mineral, seed or herbal oil components, including, sesame seed oil, jojoba, flaxseed, hemp, soybean, borage oil, etc and these products do retard evaporation. Meaning that these ingredients don’t directly hydrate skin, they an environment for self repair to your skin. Other ways to add water to your skin would include the use of what is called a medical humectant, or a natural moisturizing substance. Some products act like sponges that hold water, so hyaluronic acid or “HA”, is a sponge that soaks up water, and it’s the water that allows it to fill not the HA itself, but it does this so effectively it is often recommended over other moisturizing agents.

Evening Your Natural Skin Tone

An even tone to the skin is radiant and natural. We want our skin to be the best color and blend of tones that we have naturally been born with. Discolored skin, or uneven coloration to our skin is the root of much skin disatisfaction. Discoloration treatments may be one of the most active area of skin research,. For each what is "desirable" in skin color varies widely, and getting an even better tone is not the same as lightening, or even quite the same as brightening, for those qualities other techniques are employed! Think of skin tone, a color pops into your mind, but it's actually a blend of yellow, brown and reds that makes up classic "skin" color. We each have a blended tone: the yellow tones which mostly is derived from the collagen content, the brown tones which comes from the pigment melanin, and the red tones that come from hemoglobin, or more simply put the components of our blood.  As one or the other takes over the skin tone becomes uneven. Excess brown or dark patches is one of the most common reason for uneven tone, and are not desirable to most of us. Skin professionals can recommend products and treatments that reduce this in several ways, but ultimately one of the most successful ways to get rid of brown is to reduce the amount of melanin, by decreasing the amount of melanin produced in your skin. In addition to decreasing this melanin synthesis, we want to stop melanin from leaving skin cells and seeping into the skin, speedup the process of melanin exfoliation, and possibly even change the pigment melanin itself so it’s not so dark. Of course individual recommendations will vary based on your experiences, your unique skin, your hormone levels, and any reactions you may have had in the past. One such product to do these things effectively is hydroquinone. Hydroquinone will actually invade the skin cells or the melanocytes, and aid their destruction. It comes in various strengths and when we recommend a product we want one that will be effective. Natural products, that probably have better safety records to their ingredients, include  kojic acid arbutin, coffeeberry, blueberry, licorice, pulp mulberry, bearberry extract,  to name a few,and most important thing is sunscreen, which will so prevent UVA from tanning us which simply means stimulating these discoloration factors we are working rather hard to combat!

Growing Your New Skin

Want the filler that is designed for you, because it is you? It may still be stuff of the future to think that we can grow ourselves new hearts, new kidneys, a new liver or even new bones. But there is an organ we can grow for ourselves: tissue filler! Although very new, relatively expensive, and only FDA approved for the treatment of deep lines in the area of your nasolabial folds, new tissue is able to be grown for your own use! Medically the use of your own tissue, an example might be saving blood for your own use later on, or using plasma extracts to heal joints, is called autologics. These cell implants for the use of facial rejuvenation are only the second FDA cell therapy approved. The new filler Azficel-T  is now approved for a 6 month facial treatment. The treatment has to be done by a trained physician, the treatment is relatively expensive, it’s not rapid as it takes 3 months to grow your own tissue supply, but it’s your tissue and the chances of rejection are as close to eliminated as possible with this treatment. So if you are considering fillers but haven’t wanted to use a foreign substance, this might just be for you!

Skin Welting

Dermographism in a patient with hives

If you have hives, you likely will also have a condition called physical urticaria. What happens is that any stroking of the skin, or scratching will form a raised line where you drew the line. This is also called dermographism. It will flare up within minutes of the scratch, and basically seeing what occurs is all that is needed for a diagnosis. If you are having hives it is important to tell your treating aesthetician so that they can advise you if doing treatments like microdermabrasion is safe at that time. We don't fully understand the causes, but it happens in as many as 5% of the population and will last weeks, months or years. Relapses can occur even after the condition resolves. Some women report worsening during their menstrual cycle but this hasn't been confirmed by all studies. It's possible that a skin infection or antibiotics trigger it. Using over the counter antihistamines is not a bad first line of treatment, and others may need prescription strength or even other types of medication. Some people need chronic medication to control the symptoms.

Skin Darkening in Pregnancy

Darkening of the skin in pregnancy is called hyperpigmentation and it used to be that we thought it was related to what is called melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH), now we've decided it really is not certain why pregnant women get this skin darkening. Virtually 90% of patients will exhibit darkening of their skin during pregnancy, even if it's only in selected areas or only slightly darker. In fact extra pigment containing cells, known as melanocytes seem to cluster in areas, and can even form knots. These new skin knots that you can see are due to new skin melanocytes. If a woman gets darkening of her face it's called chloasma. This darkening is best treated after the pregnancy with some form of skin lightening and most commonly in the past we used tretinoin ointment. Other areas of the body that may darken are the areolae around the nipples, the inner thighs, or the linea alba which is a fine line that runs down the center of the abdomen. About half of all women will have chloasma itself. Moles, or nevi, while they may darken along with the overall darkening of the skin, should not change in size in pregnancy and if they do you need this evaluated.

Sudden Unwanted Hair Growth Explained: It May Not Be Your Hormones!

What now you ask? Suddenly you are seeing more excess hair, and you want to know what has changed. Your first thought is that you now have a hormone imbalance? Perhaps? Perhaps women who now notice they have excess hair have a missed diagnosis of polycystic ovaries called PCOS? Maybe, and we've discussed that condition in several other posts. But excess hair growth is affected by glands other than just our ovaries. So you wonder if you have adrenal gland abnormalities, adrenal gland stress? Perhaps as well. It can't be aging, we think PCOS might actually get a bit better with age. But a hidden source of abnormalities was poited out by Dr. Elise Olsen a Merck & Co consultant and an Investigator for Eisai Pharmaceuticals and a Dermatopharmacologist at Duke: drug exposures! Many medications have unwanted hair growth as a side effect. And that can not only be a problem to treat, but pose a problem for the cure! So be sure to check that med cab and the labels before you bop to our spas for laser hair removal!

Prevent Oral Herpes Outbreak

Prevention of oral herpes (cold sores, or the medical term herpes labalis) is desirable as active lesions are both painful and more likely to shed virus that can be spread.  Individuals with oral infections can spread the lesions to other areas with broken skin, such as the fingers or nail bed or the eye. So the infection control is very important for your health. And prevention is also important for skin health as oral lesions can get secondarily infected or leave scaring that can be unsightly from a contour perspective but also cause post-inflammatory pigment discoloration. For some individuals treatment of the cold sores as soon as you know that they are going to occur is good enough, it will shorten the average outbreak from ten days to four days and there is less shedding of virus as well. Unfortunately treating each outbreak won't decrease the number of episodes you will have. To minimize the chance of any scaring or unsightly pigment is important to keep any lesions very clean, which may mean the use of an antiseptic. For women who want to still use lipstick some experts will suggest a mineral gloss with sunscreen in it. I also think that those who have frequent outbreaks taking a daily antiviral to minimize outbreaks, or at least a preventative course of anti-viral with aesthetic treatments is very important.