If you’ve ever envied the youthful, glowing skin of Hollywood’s elite, you may chalk it up to lucky good genes. But microneedling may also play a role. This breakthrough technology is one of the best-kept secrets of the in-crowd. Microneedling delivers youthful, revitalized-looking skin at any age.
When you’re younger, your skin is thick, strong, and elastic due to an abundance of critical proteins: collagen, which forms an interlocking, supportive matrix, and elastin, which gives your skin the property of elasticity. As you age or are exposed to the sun’s damaging ultraviolet rays, however, both collagen and elastin break down and become degraded.
You also produce less of these key proteins as the years go by, so you don’t replace the older strands with new ones.
Microneedling, however, jump-starts your skin into producing new collagen and elastin. Tiffany Su, MD of Skin Shop medSpa in Houston, Texas, uses the top-in-class AquaGold® Fine Touch single-use microneedling device. The ground-breaking technology creates controlled microchannels in your skin with tiny needles.
These controlled, narrow channels in your skin trigger the body’s wound-healing response.
Dr. Su is highly trained and experienced in performing this treatment. Unlike home kits, which feature rollers that use short needles to create haphazard wound channels, professional microneedling is more uniform, deeper, and more effective. Dr. Su uses microneedling to:
Although most women and men choose to microneedle their facial and neck skin, you can improve skin and scars anywhere on your body with microneedling. Microneedling also improves the health of follicles on your scalp to regrow hair.
Dr. Su can customize your treatment by applying platelet-rich plasma (PRP) atop the channels. PRP is a product of regenerative medicine of a concentration of a patient's platelets to accelerate the healing. To prepare your PRP, Dr. Su withdraws a small amount of blood from your arm, then processes it in a centrifuge. After your microneedling session, she brushes the PRP on your skin, so the growth factors and nutrients in your platelets reach into the deepest layers of your skin to accelerate collagen remodeling.
Directly after your microneedling session, with or without PRP, you’ll probably notice that your skin looks healthier and more glowing. Over the following weeks to months, as your skin starts to remodel itself with new collagen and elastin, you’ll notice other improvements, too, such as tighter skin and smaller pores.
Dr. Su may recommend a series of microneedling treatments spaced about a month or two apart for best results.
Ready for red carpet skin? Schedule an appointment at Skin Shop MedSpa today.
