Local Doctor Using Anti-Aging Techniques
Are you starting to notice more lines around your eyes or mouth or forehead? Or maybe those sun spots are starting to bother you.
Doctors have more and more ways to make you look younger, without going under the knife.
Robin Bliss, of Imperial, went to Ideal Facial Plastic and Laser Surgery on the South Side when she wanted to do something to improve the appearance of wrinkles around her mouth and nose,
"Of course, we're all getting older, [I'm] in my late 40s now, had these lines here my whole life, and want to look younger, a little bit fresher," she said.
Dr. Paul Leong, a plastic surgeon who runs Ideal Plastic Surgery, says gravity is just one of the problems we face as we get older.
"If you think of grandma, thin temples, sunken eyes, that's volume loss," Leong says. "That's something we can counter for a good long time with injectables like Perlane and Restylane here in the office."
Perlane and Restylane are known as fillers; they fill in the folds or wrinkles.
Dr. Leong injected Bliss around her mouth and nose, called the nasal labial folds.
It can also be done in the lips, cheeks and under the eyes. It can last about six months for the lips, 10 to 11 months for the nasal labial folds and two years for under the cheeks and eyes. The results are immediate.
The fillers like Perlane and Restylane start at $600. For Bliss' treatment, it was $1,200 to fill in the folds around her mouth and nose.
Something that lasts longer are laser treatments.
"What it's able to do is it tightens the collagen under the skin and allows for more firmness. It tightens pores and eliminates some sort of color irregularities," Leong says.
It causes minor, temporary redness and takes a series of treatments, a month apart, for the full results to show.
Laser treatments can last for three to six years. It costs about $1,400 for an individual area of the face or $2,500 for the whole face.
How painful are these treatments? There's some numbing agent in the filler, so that helps with the injection pain, and the laser has a cooling effect on the tip.
Bliss says on a scale of one to 10 where 10 is the worst pain, it was a two and a half.
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