You can have long term improvement in some acne scars. For depressed scars, a strong chemical peel using a toothpick can help raise the depressed scars/pock marks. Also, this can be done with the co2 laser.

The other way to improve those scars is just to incise them and remove the scars and carry out a reclosure. This new incision can then be resurfaced with a chemical peel or laser to improve the appearance of the new incision. This can be done all throughout your face. It takes a lot of work but it can be done and a noticeable improvement can be accomplished.

Here is a live demonstration video of an Acne Treatment Procedure.

Thanks for reading,

Dr Young

Dr Youngspecializes in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

There are multiple ways to improve your scarring from acne (Dr Young from Seattle Washington). You want the simple answer. Yes, there are a lot of lasers out there but most simply put lasers are used to take away the top layers of the skin to remove the scarring and then what happens is that your skin cells deep within your hair follicles grow out and “resurface” your face and skin. The newer fractional lasers essentially manipulate your skin deeper to cause skin tightening to help improve the wrinkles such as Fraxel and Deep FX.  Lasers are just part of the treatment. You want to either have a co2 or erbium laser. Co2 allows more aggressive treatment.

All of the other names are just company names for either the co2 or erbium. Just ask your doctor to tell you what laser it is and the most important is knowing the wavelength and the name that is associated with the wavelength. Sometimes it requires other procedures for certain type of scars. Some of your more depressed scars require surgical excision or subscision where you use a needle to elevate the depressed scars so that the depressed area is more level with the rest of the skin. At times, this entails cutting around the whole part of the depressed scars to allow it to elevate. Laser resurfacing after this helps with the healing. Here is a live demonstration video of an Acne Treatment Procedure.

Thanks for reading,

Dr Young

Dr Young specializes in Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

This discussion was directed at a question on why fractionated lasers haven’t worked on a particular person’s acne scars. Fractioned lasers will gradually improve your scars. It also depends on how your scars look. Some scars need to be excised first before they actually can get really better.  Other times require subcision techniques which require you to use different instruments, such as punch biopsies or needles to elevate depressed scars so that they match the surrounding levels of the skin. You may need more significant approaches for the scars such as co2 resurfacing as well to get the results that you really want. Also, some scars require excision and closure and further resurfacing to improve them.  Here is a live demonstration of my use of a fraxel co2 laser.

Thanks for reading,

Dr Young

Dr Youngspecializes in Facial Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery and is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington