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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – Your face may look great because you are programmed to take good care of it, but your hands also take a lot of abuse and most of us pay less attention to their care and protection. They are subjected to cumulative sun exposure and collagen breakdown just like the skin on your face, neck, and décolleté. The skin on the hands also tends to be thin, and sun damage causes brown spots, slackening, and wrinkling, and these textural changes cause visible signs of aging. Wearing a hand cream with SPF 30 daily helps prevent some of this damage, but there are many effective treatments to help correct it. Most treatments that can be done on your face, neck, chest, and any other area can be applied to your hands too. It’s a matter of prioritizing what aspect of your aging hands is your main concern; bulging veins, thin skin, brown spots, or volume loss.
For discoloration, tone, and texture, a series of peels and/or intense pulsed light treatments can help significantly over time. IPL treatments from Lumenis, for example, used to treat the hands address the effects of photoaging and sun damage without downtime or side effects. Brown discoloration will be lightened with each session. If deeper pigmented spots are your main concern, lasers such as the Q-switched Nd: YAG can lighten them more effectively. If you have sun damage generally, non-ablative fractional laser devices can produce dramatically more even-toned hands after a series of treatments. Skin-tightening devices, including Pelleve Wrinkle Reduction system, can also work nicely for hands in need of tone and textural improvements. According to Bonnie Marting, DNP, ARNP of Anushka Cosmedical Centre, Palm Beach, Florida (www.anushkaspa), “Cutera® Limelight is our “go to” treatment for the face, neck, décolleté and hands for redness, tiny veins and solar lentigenes, which in Florida is one of our greatest clinical challenges.”
If your hands are thin and have lost their youthful plumpness with age, volumizing is possible by using your own fat taken from your tummy or hips and injecting it into aging hands to camouflage ropey veins and improve shriveling. Restylane®, Perlane®, Radiesse®, Sculptra® Aesthetic are also commonly used for hand rejuvenation. According to New York Plastic Surgeon Z Paul Lorenc, MD (www.lorenc.com), “Sculptra® Aesthetic is an ideal volumizing treatment for hands, used off label, because it stimulates collagen tightening and acts as a sculpting agent. The duration of results will depend on how many sessions are performed and whether your concerns are mainly related to thin hands with prominent bones or visible veins. Typically I will do two to three treatments at monthly intervals to achieve maximum tissue stimulation.” For bulging veins, Botox® and Dysport® may be used off label to soften their appearance.
Hands are a small surface area, so skin resurfacing treatments (chemical peels, lasers, light based devices) are quick treatments, but you can expect to need repeat sessions as the aging process continues. Daily SPF application is a must to maintain your skin improvement. For daytime, try SkinMedica Environmental Defense Sunscreen™ SPF 30+, a light, long lasting formula with free radical fighting antioxidants that comes in a flat tube to throw in your bag and reapply throughout the day. Treat your hands to a weekly spa therapy with Talika Hand Ritual Gommage that sloughs dead cells away like a mini peel, followed by Talika Hand Ritual Serum to brighten skin tone.
Wendy Lewis is President of Wendy Lewis & Co Ltd, Global Aesthetics Consultancy, and author of 11 books on beauty and the Founder and Editor in Chief of BeutyintheBag Reach her at [email protected]
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