Reasons why I microneedle 4 times a year!
Quartery microneedling is something I’ve been doing for a few years now. I don’t mind having some downtime, make-up free and having people ask me if I just had something done to my face (especially my 4 year old). I struggle with acne and melasma so I use microneedling to help break up old pigment from acne marks or some hyperpigmentation from hormones and the sun. The added benefit is that I’m stimulating collagen which in turn helps my tox last longer and minimize other fine lines that tox can’t treat.
Benefits of Microneedling
With quarterly microneedling sessions, you’re stimulating collagen by 400%. You start losing collagen in your 20’s and continue to lose about 1% a year after that. By combining microneedling, Sculptra, and a good retinol, there’s no way you’ll age!
Think about your skin like a piece of paper and the “thickness” of your paper as collagen. Over time when you’re moving your face (smiling, talking, squinting, raising your brows) that paper is going to fold and get a crease in it. If you have a lot of collagen in your skin, when you fold the paper, it is less likely to crease. On the other hand, if your paper is very thin, when it folds over and then unfolds, the crease is more easily made. Over time, that crease becomes stronger and stronger and it makes it difficult for you to not see the crease even if that paper isn’t folding over anymore.
With this example, you can use microneedling as a benefit to either of the pieces of paper. The thicker paper has collagen that was stimulated by the consistent microneedling sessions. Here you can see the benefits of microneedling now, before your paper gets too thin. The thinner piece of paper hasn’t been stimulating collagen for awhile now, so the paper is thin and the crease is predominant. In order to get that crease out now, microneedling can be used to break up that “scar tissue” that created the stagnant crease in addition to building collagen to thicken the paper.
Who is microneedling for?
Microneedling is a great way for patients to stimulate collagen effectively, break up pigment and acne scarring, decrease pore size, and improve skin texture. The only patient’s I avoid it on, are those that have active acne due to it spreading bacteria elsewhere.
Microneedling is great for people who want to avoid getting neurotoxins but can also those that are avid neurotoxin users! For patients who want to avoid tox, microneedling helps to build up the collagen in your skin to where you can still have movement (since you never got the tox), but then you are also also preventing those “creases in your paper” to get deep enough to form a strong line. For patients who do get tox, microneedling is a great way to make those other fine lines and creases from getting worse. Neurotoxins can’t treat all of the lines on your face, only the ones whose muscles you freeze. You can’t make your radial cheek lines stop forming with tox because then it would mess up your smile, so you have to keep stagnant lines from forming by stimulating collagen (thickening up your paper).
Is there a real added benefit to microneedling with exosomes?
Exosomes (growth factors, peptides, & proteins) help to accelerate the healing process with microneedling. It adds extra nutrients that are delivered into the skin with the action of needling them in, resulting in a faster recovery, improved skin tone, texture, and overall skin rejuvenation. For this reason, they have both short-term and long-term benefits when combined with needling.
What is the down-time with microneedling?
It takes about a full week for you to be back to “normal” after a microneedling treatment. Immediately after, you are bright red. You may feel hot, tight, and dry just like after a really bad sunburn. Typically the redness decreases by about 50% the next day and your skin is still pretty dry. I tend to get a little flaky and rough texture on day 3 and the majority of that goes away by day 5. By the end of the week you can hardly see any dry patches and you’re starting to see that glow!