As summer winds down, the time you spent with family and friends outdoors leaves you with a smile, but also a few extra brown spots on your skin. If pictures are the only things you want to remember your summer fun by, laser therapy can help.
Here at Lasting Impressions Medical Aesthetics, we’ve equipped ourselves with the latest laser technology to help our clients in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, fight back against aging and the elements. Our noninvasive treatments are at the cutting edge of skin rejuvenation techniques.
To explore how we can erase your brown spots and other skin damage with laser therapy, here’s a look at how the spots develop and what we can do about them.
X marks the spot
Age spots, liver spots, sun spots — whatever you call them, they’re the basically different names for a condition known as hyperpigmentation. Sun spots usually develop on the most exposed areas of your skin, and they’re a result of excess melanin production. Your melanin performs the crucial role of absorbing the sun’s rays so they don’t damage your body, which is how you develop a darker color when you’ve been in the sun.
As you get older, however, your melanin tends to clump together, leaving some spots on your skin looking bleached out while the pigment masses together to form hyperpigmentation spots in other areas. The end result is that your skin can take on an uneven, splotchy look after being exposed to the sun without protection.
On top of the discolorations, the sun ages your skin faster than almost any other force, as the radiation from the ultraviolet rays causes serious damage to your skin cells. This leads to a breakdown in your skin on a cellular level, resulting in wrinkles, lines, and sagging skin.
Clearing it up
Now that we’ve reviewed how the summer months with the high sun can damage your skin, let’s look at how we can fix it this fall. With our advanced laser technology, we can break up the darker spots, bringing back an even tone to your skin.
The laser delivers targeted bursts of energy that are measured in the trillionths of a second. This energy travels through your skin, without harming the surface area, and targets and shatters the pigment below. Because of the intensity and rapidity of the laser energy, your darker pigment literally shakes itself apart.
Once your pigment is broken apart into tiny particles, your body simply flushes them out through your lymphatic system.
While our laser system is ideally suited for brown spots, it also creates a mild healing response in your skin, which signals your body to produce more collagen and elastin. These two proteins are responsible for the structural support of your skin. So when we use the laser, your body responds with renewed collagen and elastin, tightening and firming your skin from the inside out.
This means that we can not only tackle the brown spots on your skin, we can also help undo some of the cellular breakdown that comes with sun exposure, allowing new skin cells to develop that brighten and freshen your skin.
The big reveal
When you come in for your initial consultation, Dr. Roel Galope sits down with you to review your skin and comes up with an appropriate treatment timeline. If you have moderate-to-severe discoloration, you may need several treatments, spaced several weeks apart, to fully clear your skin. If it’s just a small area, one treatment may all that’s necessary.
Either way, the treatments themselves are very quick — usually just 10-15 minutes — and you can get right back to your day directly afterward.
Your results will reveal themselves gradually as your body processes the broken-up particles and responds with renewed collagen and elastin. Typically, your optimal results become clear about six weeks after your last treatment. At this point, it’s up to you to maintain them by covering your skin as best you can the next time you’re in the sun.
If you’d like to undo the summer damage this fall, please give us a call or use the online booking tool on this website to schedule an appointment.
