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spas & salons
Need a new ‘do? Some pampering? High-tech beauty help? Read on…
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turbo charged IPL
When it comes to patchy pigmentation and broken capillaries, few treatments offer the instant satisfaction of intense pulsed light technology (IPL), which targets, heats and ultimately destroys excess melanin in the dermal and epidermal layers of skin. But now, you can expect even greater skin-clearing happiness from IPL sessions. Why?
Let’s rewind to a few years back, when skin specialists began noting the cosmetic side-benefits of photodynamic therapy (PDT), a treatment for possibly pre-cancerous sun spots. In PDT, skin is coated with the photosensitising agent, aminolaevulinic acid (ALA), which is absorbed by abnormal cells and helps light energy to locate and selectively destroy these cells. A spin-off benefit was clearer, firmer-looking skin. Some clever white coats then surmised that ALA might have interesting implications for cosmetic light-based treatment.
“The breakthrough has simply been in migrating the treatment of skin cancer to the cosmetic field,” says Dr Geoffrey Heber, from Sydney’s Heber Davis clinic, where he recently introduced what he calls turbo charged IPL, in which ALA is applied to the skin and left to absorb for 30–60 minutes. “It reduces the number of IPL procedures you would otherwise need,” says Dr Heber. “We’re seeing that people may only need one third of the number of sessions they would have had without ALA in order to treat pigmentation, so people get faster results.”
Related Articles:
Pigment Treatments
Plasma Resurfacing
Microdermabrasion
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