There are multiple ways to improve your scarring from Laser Resurfacing. 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.

Dr Young is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

There are a lot of different lasers out there. Essentially for Laser Resurfacing, there are two lasers out there: CO2 and Erbium.

CO2 allows you to be more aggressive and you can vary the degree of this to fit anyone. Lumenis and their Active FX/Deep FX is the best in my opinion and in the opinion of the most infleuntial people out there. This is a CO2 laser.

Erbium has some limitations in that it can’t go very deep and doesn’t cause tissue contraction like CO2 lasers can. All other lasers such as Fraxel and Fractional lasers work by causing manipulation to the deeper layers of the skin to cause skin tightening. There are just a lot of companies out there selling them with different names. You just have to ask them what technology they are using and if they are making it complicated then I would ask someone else. These lasers take more treatments and take more time and money but have less downtime based on company reports.

However, I’ve heard from other patients that Fraxel and other fractionated lasers can cause more downtime than what the “people” are telling everyone.

What’s the best? It depends on how significant your wrinkles are. The more significant, the more aggressive you might want to be. It also depends on your lifestyle. Does your lifestyle dictate that you can’t have any downtime, if so you should consider less aggressive means.

Dr Young is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

Generally speaking, the more risk the more rewards when consideringLaser Resurfacing. Co2 lasers can be varied in a number of ways to increase or decrease the aggressiveness of the treatments. Fractional co2 laser resurfacing has less downtime but has less results. This approach leaves healthy skin in between treated skin so that the healthy skin can help the treated skin rejuvenate. This speeds up the healing and decreases the chance of complications. The results are less significant.

For more significant results, a more aggressive approach can take more layers of the skin and can go deeper to take away more significant wrinkles. The healing period is much longer and the chance of complications are more, but the potential for greater gains is more possible. These lasers improve the skin by decreasing wrinkles, removing superficial pigmentation, decreasing pores, and tightening the skin.

The more aggressive approach will need less number of treatments. The less aggressive approach with less results will need more treatments to get more results. With the most aggressive co2 resurfacing you may not need to get treated for another 8-10 years.  If you want to improve sun spot and red spots then IPL or other lasers can be used to improve them and typically it can take from 4-5 treatment to get satisfactory results.

Dr Young is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

Generally, you can go up to 3 mm away from your eyelid margin to treat wrinkles around your eye with Laser Resurfacing.  In this case it will be beneficial to have eyeshields to protect your eyes.  When you get really close to the eyelid margin you will put your eyelashes at risk.  Even if the laser doesn’t hit it directly, you can have the plume singe the eyelashes.  There are some that think the eyelashes do not grow back as long.

My experience has been with Deep FX.  This can tighten up your skin but may need multiple treatments to get the results that you would like.  Traditional co2 lasers can tighten up your skin in one treatment but you will have a week or so downtime.

The other way to improve the wrinkles is to volumize the area. It can be done especially in the lower eyelid and upper cheek area to bring back the youth that you used to have.  Instead of cutting tissue away you add the volume that made you look young long ago.

Dr Young is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington

Laser Resurfacing can treat the more superficial elements of the skin like superficial wrinkles, pigmentation, and scars. Deep fx stimulates more of the deeper tissue to cause the skin to contract and shrink to increase the tone of the skin and create more collagen within the deeper layers. They can be done together for less downtime and more results.

With just Active FX, you will get more subtle resutls and less down time; when you add Deep FX, you get more tightening while keeping the down time less. Deep FX creates a strong laser that penetrates deeply while Active FX is more superficial with less penetration. Especially for people with darker skin, this modality is ideal!

Dr Young is located in Bellevue near Seattle, Washington