Erase Sun Damange With Juvederm Voluma, IPL and More!

Summer is officially over. The sun was fun, but now it’s time to erase the damage. This article from NewBeauty.com goes over what needs to be done to get younger looking skin.

From topical treatments that lighten to in-office lasers that ablate
the upper layer of skin, there are a myriad of options to limit the look
of sun-damaged skin. Topicals are almost always the first
recommendation to address sun damage, and are often coupled with more
aggressive treatments.

If you have freckles and minimal sunspots, erase them with Intense Pulsed Light (IPL):
Although the least intense type of sun damage—they can be dark and
large in quantity—freckles tend to surface on the skin as early as
childhood. “After the summer months are over, many patients come in
trying to get rid of their spots and we offer them Intense Pulsed Light
(IPL) treatments. In my opinion, it’s the best tool to get rid of both
red and brown pigmentation,” says Brooklyn, NY, dermatologist Tatiana Khrom, MD.
“IPL is one of my favorites because it does a great job of normalizing
color, so you can really get those light and dark brown spots. The more
you do this, the more collagen that forms, so your skin looks healthier
and smoother. IPL is a great treatment for someone who isn’t ready for a
fractional laser just yet,” says Delray Beach, FL, dermatologist Janet Allenby, MD.

If you have severe age spots, erase them with hydroquinone or kojic acid and laser resurfacing:
Ranging in color from brown to almost black and in size from something
bigger than a freckle to as big as a coin, age spots (also known as
liver spots and sunspots) are a direct result of excessive sun exposure
that has prompted an overproduction of melanin. When it’s an isolated
brown spot that isn’t too dark, hydroquinone or kojic acid, used with
Retin-A, can help reduce discoloration. “It’s the more aggressive
procedures, like lasers, that really work to resurface the skin. The
principle is that the body recognizes a wound (created by the laser) and
heals it with new collagen and new skin. Erbium and fractionated CO2 lasers
remove the outer layer of skin to reveal healthy new skin as the skin
heals,” says Lafayette, LA, plastic surgeon Darrell L. Henderson, MD.

If you have skin that is uneven in texture, erase it with regular at-home exfoliation and chemical peels:
“The sun sucks the life right out of your skin,” says Dr. Henderson.
“After skin is damaged, it looks older than it should and more leathery
in texture. It’s not smooth or youthful-looking because there is a lack
of healthy collagen and elastin, making the skin look rough, dull and
weathered.” Regular exfoliation with alphahydroxy acids (AHAs) like
salicylic, lactic and glycolic acids can help—you’ll see the most
improvement when they are used in tandem with a prescription-strength
retinoid to further smooth the skin. “In those cases where skin is
really mottled looking, I’ll suggest a series of chemical peels. We’re
doing them a lot more than in years past because what we have to offer
patients today works so well to improve the texture of skin,” says Dr.
Allenby. Chemical peels physically exfoliate the top layer of skin and
repair some of the damage with specific ingredients, namely acids.

If you have lines and wrinkles, erase them with fillers and injectables:
Lines and wrinkles that are the result of a breakdown of collagen and
elastin from the sun need to be addressed with fillers that plump them
up from the inside out. For areas that have been affected by extreme
collagen loss, collagen-stimulating fillers like Sculptra Aesthetic and Radiesse, as well as hyaluronic acid fillers
like Juvéderm Voluma XC, can be injected. “Sun damage can cause facial
features to become flat and lose their definition. Injecting these areas
with either hyaluronic acid fillers or collagen-stimulating fillers
restores some of the fullness to skin and can fill in wrinkles. But,
these treatments don’t eliminate or reverse sun damage, but rather
merely hide it,” says Dr. Henderson.

If you have red broken blood vessels, erase them with two to three treatments of pulsed-dye laser:
Small and thin, blood vessels can easily break from anything like
stress, pregnancy, being too aggressive on skin and even the sun. But
the problem comes when skin tries to repair them and can’t. Cumulative
sun damage prevents skin from regenerating these damaged vessels
properly and so the redness lingers. “Broken vessels respond well to
vascular lasers or IPL,” says Hunt Valley, MD, dermatologist Karen L. Beasley, MD.
The laser works to take the redness out because the wavelength of the
machine targets the hemoglobin in blood, which is what gives skin that
redness. “The vessel almost bursts or is reabsorbed by the body over
time and the broken capillary goes away,” says New York dermatologist
Whitney Bowe, MD.