Your skin is crucial to maintaining a youthful appearance. However, as the years go by, your skin can become blemished with wrinkles, fine lines, and sun spots. But with aesthetics, you can get rid of those blemishes for a polished look.
At Lori Scott Family Care, our team helps you achieve the most youthful look possible through a number of different cosmetic procedures. Our team is led by Dr. Lori Scott, who is an aesthetic and addiction specialist. She has the answer to your pesky sun spots with the PicoSure® Laser.
Sunspots, which are also known as age spots, are areas on your skin that darken due to sun exposure. These spots have also been called liver spots, although they have absolutely nothing to do with your liver.
Sunspots are harmless, and often show up on your skin as small, flat brown areas. The spots often occur when you’re older, but they can also show up in younger people who are in the sun a lot without SPF.
Any area of your body that’s subjected to sun exposure can have sunspots. This includes your arms, shoulders, and hands. Your face is especially prone to sunspots, as it’s often exposed to the sun.
So what causes sunspots? These spots occur due to an overproduction of melanin, which is responsible for the pigment in your skin. With repeated exposure to UV rays from the sun or tanning beds, your melanin increases production, and sometimes groups together, leading to sunspots.
Although these spots aren’t harmful, when they appear on your face, they can really affect your self-esteem. Dr. Scott can help you get rid of these spots with the PicoSure laser.
The PicoSure laser is specifically designed to work on hyperpigmented areas on your skin. While it’s used primarily for tattoo removal, it’s also used for treating sunspots and other areas of concentrated pigment on your skin.
The laser seeks out areas of your skin where there’s hyperpigmentation. This allows it to concentrate it’s beam on the sunspot, and break up the pigment.
The device works by using laser light energy. To break up the pigment, it changes the laser into short and concentrated pulses of pressure. This allows the pigment to break into tiny particles, which are then absorbed by your body and expelled through your lymphatic system.
The device gets its name because of the speed of the pulses of energy. The PicoSure laser expels these pulses in one picosecond. This is essentially one trillionth of a normal second, making it very fast and controlled.
To get rid of your sunspots, Dr. Scott positions the laser near the areas that you want treated. Once the laser is turned on, it goes to work finding the hyperpigmented spots and moving over them quickly and efficiently, while breaking up the clumps of melanin.
The procedure itself is quick and relatively painless. Depending on what you’re getting treated and the area it’s in, you could be done within about 30 minutes or so. It’s a procedure you can fit into your lunch break.
One amazing benefit of the PicoSure laser is that it requires no downtime after your treatment. You may have some redness on your skin in the area of the treatment, but it should go away relatively quickly. In some cases, you may even have a small amount of swelling from the laser therapy, but that too should subside quickly.
Depending on the amount of sunspots you have, Dr. Scott may recommend more than one treatment if they persist after the first treatment.
If you’re interested in learning more about removing your sun spots, call our office today at 252-238-7079 to schedule a consultation with Dr. Scott, or you may book a consultation online.
