Richard M. Foxx, MD
Back in the good old days, say about 10 years ago, there were only a few ways to fix sun-damaged skin—peels, or ablative laser skin resurfacing using the CO2 or Erbium laser. Those lasers usually required some form of sedation or even anesthesia and were associated with several weeks of downtime during which the skin healed from what amounted to a deep second-degree burn. They often left the treated skin a lighter color.
If you didn’t want to undergo that kind of therapy the alternative was for your aesthetician to do a peel and peels became the stock-in-trade of aesthetic medicine for brown spots, large pores, softening lines and wrinkles, as well as for improving acne. For a while it seemed that every skin care guru was devising a proprietary peel, from Jessner to Obagi, using tri-chloro acetic acid (TCA) and other acids in some arcane combinations.
With the advent of the non-ablative lasers such as CUTERA’s™ Genesis and XEO and the Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) systems, skin improvement could finally be achieved without downtime. When fractional skin resurfacing with FRAXEL and other technologies was developed in about 2002, lasers took another giant step forward and it became possible to achieve, without downtime, many of the results previously only possible with the ablative lasers.
Aesthetic medicine is nothing, however, if not dynamic. What is hot one day is not the next and peels, it seems, are now coming back into vogue. Formulated with many innovative ingredients along with TCA such as azelaic acid, salicylic acids, and glycolic acid, the new generation of peels such as the VI Peel are more effective with less downtime. Even more important is the idea that these peels can offer a less expensive and yet viable alternative to laser therapy for certain skin problems.
And as with all aesthetic and laser medical procedures it is important make yourself as knowledgeable as possible, to review before and after pictures, to know who is doing the procedure, how it will be done, and to know how many your Doc’s office has performed.
Richard M. Foxx, MD is the Founder and Medical Director of The Medical and Skin Spa in Indian Wells, CA. He may be reached at 760-674-4106 or at drfoxx@medicalandskinspa.com
Tags: Brown spots, FRAXEL, Intense Pulsed Light, IPL, Peels, VI Peel