Med Spas to Eliminate Tired Looking Skin
It’s pretty much a fact of life, “when you look good, you feel good,” and in today’s youth-conscious society most people want to look their best.
Cosmetic surgery has been helping people turn back time for decades, and in the battle against the clock it has a new ally in med spas.
Med spas offer noninvasive skin treatments that can be the bridge between tired-looking skin and surgery.
Claremont resident Lorraine Ricciardi had sun spots on her face, neck and chest. They didn’t bother her enough to have surgery, but was open to other options.
“I grew up in California and spent a lot of time in the sun,” said Ricciardi, a 50-year-old knock-out. “It’s not that I was unhappy, but I knew my skin could improve.”
Ricciardi, who owns the Claremont boutique, Too Blonde, noticed that a med spa had opened not far from her business and decided to check it out.
She discovered that gia Laser Aesthetic Center, founded by vascular surgeon Dr. Jeffery W. Kronson, offered various nonsurgical laser skin treatments.
Kronson, who’s been a staunch advocate of noninvasive enhancement procedures for years, opened the center because he wanted to offer an alternative to going under the knife.
“I’m all for surgery when it’s needed,” he said. “But there are people who are having face-lifts way too young – years, decades, before they needed them.”
Ricciardi was nervous, but decided to have laser skin treatments. She soon learned those fears were unfounded.
“It feels like little rubber bands lightly flicking you,” she said. “At first your face looks red, a little sunburned. After about two weeks my skin looked so much better. I don’t have to wear near as much make-up as I used to. I’m getting lots of compliments, people are always saying, `you look so good. What are you doing to your skin?”‘
Laser technology has an abundance of positives for clients such as being less expensive and noninvasive with no scaring or much recuperation time.
Dr. Subhas Gupta, the chief of plastic surgery at Loma Linda University Medical Center, believes in utilizing the technology of noninvasive treatments and jokes that he loses about 20 percent of his patients to such procedures.
“We have very clear parameters to evaluate an aging face that guides us to surgery,” Gupta said. “Everybody gets wrinkles, it’s all gravity and sun. Maybe you can avoid them if you hung upside down in the dark.”
He explained that wrinkles are mainly either paralytic – the kind that come and go like smile lines or crows feet – or static – the ones that are there all the time.
Plastic surgeons determine the severity of wrinkles by a scale of one to four created by Dr. Richard Glagau. Wrinkles should be at least 1.5 mm deep for any surgical procedure.
There are also varying degrees of face-lifts and through an evaluation it can be decided what can be improved, how much it will improve and how long recovery will take.
“About 25 percent of my patients walk in, have the procedure, walk out and go to work the next day,” he said. “About 50 percent take about a seven-day recovery time and 25 percent, mostly those over 65 take about two-to-three weeks to recover.”
The most important issue to Gupta is that all patients make an informed decision.
“Patients have to know their every option,” he said. “They need to have them presented clearly so they understand all the options, alternatives and risks.”
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