Beauty And The Blog

Posts Tagged ‘IPL’

Anti-aging skin care for the neck. Yes, your neck. And your decolletage (that area between your collar bones and the top of your breasts). Ever think about it? Or do you just zoom in with that magnifying mirror on every little line on your face? By the way, both my dermatologist and I recommend that you lose that magnifying mirror. I used to stare into one myself. So every single imperfection became larger than life. No one, I repeat, no one, sees what you see when using a 4x or 5x magnifying mirror. So stop torturing yourself. If you must use one for the application of eye makeup, OK. But stick to the eye makeup and move on.

Back to the neck. Yes it ages just like your face does. As we age we lose the nice layer of subcutaneous fat (baby fat, so it’s sometimes called). Our faces and neck are the one area we don’t really want to lose fat, now is it? Because the fat in that area is what can keep your skin looking plump and youthful. Sadly, without it the skin sags. Around the eyes, cheeks and the neck.

So have you been ignoring your neck and decolletage when performing your morning and evening anti-aging regimen? Yes, you have? Time to start paying attention to that area. Read the rest of this entry »

Poikiloderma of Civatte (the Civatte refers to just below the epidermis/skin). I mentioned this skin condition in “Anti-Aging, Skin Care and IPL Treatment: Part I”.

Sounds scary, huh? It’s not. It’s a pigmentation issue caused by over exposure to the sun without sunscreen as a child. So all you moms out there, protect your little ones. Now that we have so many great sun protection products available, use them! Some researchers believe it is also hereditary as it seems to show up repeatedly in families.

Poikiloderma of Civatte can take years to show up on the surface of the skin. It is mostly middle aged women (me), and sometimes men, that get this. It does sometimes show up in much younger individuals. It is predominately a female issue for some odd reason that no one has yet figured out. Hormonal perhaps?

So anyway, Poikiloderma of Civatte is a brownish or reddish discoloration that appears on the neck, upper chest and sometimes the cheeks. The more you expose the area unprotected to the sun, the more prominent it becomes. In some cases it can be itchy and/or scaly. Mine was fairly minor and only on the neck. It did not itch or appear scaly.

Can I tell you how much I did not like having this discoloration on my neck? I did not have as much discoloration as pictured above, but still it bothered me. I had been told at one time that my only option to remove it would be a laser treatment. Long downtime with the blistering and peeling. And costly. Read the rest of this entry »

IPL. Know what that is? Intense Pulsed Light. It’s a computer controlled instrument that emits high intensity pulses of light that penetrate the skin. This is also known as IPL Photorejuvenation. This is something only a medical professional can administer.

Know what it does? A number of very cool things actually. IPL is capable of eliminating or reducing fine wrinkles, redness (rosacea, flushing), freckles, age spots, some types of minor sun damage, various types of visible or broken blood vessels and capillaries, and hyper and hypo pigmentation (dark or light patches on the surface of the skin). It can smooth your skin and improve the texture. It can also treat certain undesirable conditions of the skin, such as Poikiloderma Civatte (I know, what the heck is that?! That’s coming in Part II).

There are different types of IPL that address different issues. Some types can remove a tattoo, some can remove unwanted hair. And another that addresses the signs of aging such as those mentioned above. Lots of great things can be accomplished using IPL. But we are talking anti-aging and skin care here.  And undesirable skin issues. Read the rest of this entry »