By Hummingbird Medi Spa

What Does That Machine Do? …Part 2

Sep 3, 2019 | 4:52 AM

Continuing on from last month’s article about different types of lasers and what they do, this month I will touch on other Machines used in the Aesthetic world. Comparing Chemical Peels and Microdermabrasion; Both methods remove layers of skin from the surface of the skin. You have to understand how human skin works to be able to understand why you should have one service vs the other or neither. The outer third of most people’s skin is made up of dead skin cells and oil (sebum) – think rice crispy square: the dead cells are rice crispies, the oil is the marshmallow (and it looks exactly like that under a microscope). The reason we have an outer layer of dead skin cells is so we do not dehydrate and die. Human skin is the biggest organ we have and it keeps our liquids inside us, amongst other things. A 50-year-old rancher can spend 10 hours a day outside on horseback and be just fine (although looking like a saddlebag with eyes, to quote a famous movie), doing the same to a 5-week old baby will see the baby end up in ICU close to death; sunburnt and dehydrated. So how much dead skin should we take off without harming ourselves for the sake of fashion? That rancher will have up to 50% of his total skin depth as dead skin layers, due to the extreme sun, heat and wind exposure he lives in every day. A 25-year-old receptionist should have only 20% dead skin layers since she spends her days inside in a more controlled environment. If she tans and smokes, she is moving her skin health more toward that of the rancher. Perfectly healthy baby skin shows a surface like tiny scales on a fish or feathers on a bird …they overlap in tiny domes to seal and create a protective shield against the harsh elements outside our body. When skin cells are damaged, the edges lift up and look more like tortilla chips than feathers or scales. This makes the skin look and feel rough. When we remove the dead outer layer of skin it can be mechanical – microdermabrasion (think sanding paper) or chemical – chemical peel (it’s an acid). The difference is with sanding paper (microderm) the skin as a whole is shaved down equally – all of the skin cells are “sanded” off, it does not discern between healthy and abnormal cells; this means if there are areas with a lot of damage (sun, wrinkles, dry, irritated skin) the same amount of skin layers will be removed from these as from the surrounding areas with thinner, but healthier skin. A microdermabrasion is in essence blind and therefore only good if you want to scrape off thick layers of dead skin – the rancher is the perfect candidate, the receptionist is not! Once the outer dead layer of the rancher’s skin is removed, he should not need to do this again for many months, until the same environmental exposure makes his skin create a thick build-up (protection) of dead cells again. His body is trying to protect itself by creating a “leathery” outer layer – evolution in action…until we humans interfere with nature. If you want a more decerning method to remove dead skin cells and want to only remove damaged skin cells, you should use a chemical peel. Since the edges of abnormal or damaged skin cells want to curl up a bit, the liquid chemical peel can seep under these cell edges, eat away at the adhesions between cells and lift these off first, without affecting the surrounding healthy cells with their locked-down covering domes. Of course, if you leave the peel on too long, it will start eating away at all the cells. Both methods can be harmful in their extremes – if the microdermabrasion is too aggressive or the chemical peel too intense or left on too long, too much skin is removed. Taking off too much skin takes away our natural protection against the environment and leads to a very high risk for hyperpigmentation (dark spots) for life. Unfortunately, I end up seeing some of these clients after they are injured and it is heartbreaking and devastating for them. If the youth of our skin is measured by how plump and round the cells are and how thick the live part of the skin is…should we not worry when someone suggests taking the skin thickness down and down and down by both these methods? People who do monthly (and often more frequent) chemical peels and microdermabrasion are in essence speeding up their ageing process. They are taking off layers and layers of cells, faster than the body can replenish it (skin turnover is 6 weeks) and thereby allow their body to have very little to no layers of dead cells to protect against the environment. They are, in essence, forcing their skin to have the outer layer of a newborn baby, but their lifestyle is that of adults (smoking, tanning, playing golf, gardening, working a whole day in central heating or AC) and their skin’s ability to replenish the lost layers is most definitely not that of a baby….it slows down every year we age. How would the young baby do if we put it naked in a bar with smokers, then naked in the garden for hours, then naked on the golf course, then naked in our office for 8 hours – that is exactly what the human face is forced to endure if its owner does high-frequency chemical peels and microdermabrasions. It cannot protect itself, because we removed all its protection. If you sand down your furniture every few weeks, you will literally have no wood left at some point, the same with doing too frequent an amount of chemical peels. It is best to invest in the correct skincare that will feed the skin; well-fed skin can continue to act like the part we really want of a baby’s skin – it will automatically slough off the dead and replenish the live layers at a high rate. In my own MediSpa we put our main emphasis on feeding the skin the correct types of vitamins, in the correct absorbable metabolic form to optimize the regrowth of skin – we try to maintain the self-correcting system of young skin, despite the chronological age of the person. It has been proven to work by the very forward-thinking Physician who designed this skincare line (not me, unfortunately) – the focus is on helping the body make the live part of the skin thicker….it is very much not shaving and peeling the skin down from the outside and creating a thinner and thinning skin complex. Do I prescribe chemical peels and microdermabrasions in my spa? Yes, I do, very often, but we use it in conjunction with methods that emphasise thickening the live layers of the skin. Next month more on Micro-needling and other methods of helping our skin grow its live parts thick and healthy. As always, we are Hummingbird MediSpa, where Beaty loves Science. Feel free to call us at 403 529 2006