If you are looking for more than ‘at home’ treatments, fall is a very popular time to head to your dermatologist office. Once school starts, lasering goes into full effect at my dermatology practice in Seattle (Modern Dermatology). There is nothing better at cleaning up the summer fun on the face, neck and chest. Laser treatments are so popular that my patients typically book them a year out to ensure they can be treated before the holidays.
Clear and Brilliant by Solta
A great laser for beginners or for maintenance to treat brown and texture with minimal down time. It’s especially effective and safe for diffusing brown like melasma. It requires 30 minutes of numbing prior to the treatment and after that you can expect a day of redness and a week of dryness and bronzing of the skin. Personally, I try to have two of these done a year, one in October and one in March.
Intense Pulsed Light
This is the treatment of choice for redness, including broken blood vessels and rosacea. It is also effective at treating brown spots such as sun spots and freckles. I do not recommend it for diffusing brown like melasma. Post-treatment, expect a few days of swelling, redness and a coffee ground like peeling of brown spots as they slough off.
Fractional Resurfacing
For those wanting significant improvement of skin, including brown spots, texture, pore size, laxity and wrinkles, I use fractionation resurfacing. This requires more downtime but also offers longer lasting results. These treatments require 1 hour of topical numbing and we even offer laughing gas (nitrous gas) to help patients through it. There are 7 days of significant recovery and for the first four days patients are red, crusty and very swollen.
Aftercare
All these treatments require skin care products to optimize healing and to prevent unwanted reactions that can negatively impact the results. In fact, we conducted a blinded randomized control study using Doctor Rogers Healing Balm and it drastically outperformed Aquaphor, which has long been the ‘go-to’ for post laser care. This is why we only use Doctor Rogers skin care products on healing skin at Modern Dermatology. If you have an upcoming laser treatment, consider purchasing our Skin Recovery 101 Kit so you can get the same quality post-care instructions I give my patients.
Meet the author: Board-certified and practicing dermatologist, Dr. Heather D. Rogers, MD, is the founder of Doctor Rogers Skin Care and Modern Dermatology in Seattle, Washington. She studied at Stanford, University of Washington School of Medicine and Columbia University Medical Center. She lectures nationally, is well published, and an active member of the American Academy of Dermatology. Highly respected among the skin care community, Dr. Rogers has been annually named “Top 1% of Most Honored Doctors in the US” by Castle Connolly.