Cosmetic Dermatology

An Education in Aging- The 5 Aging Parameters

Skin

The most widely visible organ and most highly judged regarding health, vitality, and of course aging.  The lines, spots, and texture tell the story of your life, genetics, and how well you care for yourself.  Skin is the most revered representation of youth and the most deceptive indicator of health.  Most people believe that collagen and treatments focused on collagen production are the total story in staying young, but the truth is much more complicated and more than just skin deep.  Efforts to improve the skin must never stop, they are forever, and the moment you stop is the moment you age like everyone else. At home skincare specific to your genetics is the necessary daily habit in a lifetime of behaviors.  The time to start the right skin program is now, and our team will help you understand the science of how to care for your skin. (Need a brief explanation of skin aging which will help with Skin introduction) 

Fat Pads

One of the most misunderstood aging parameters by most injectors and clients alike, leading to treatment outcomes often described as filler face, overfilled, puffy face, and in severe cases, a look that tells the world you are overdone.   

Fat Pads are simply pads of fat that are responsible for creating the features that are specific to you and your genetic heritage.  A strong understanding of genetic factors, ethnicity, age, and sex play a fundamental role in restoring these fat pads to original volumes to give a natural and restorative effect to the face.  Fat pads are not like fat cells.  Fat cells get smaller and larger depending on calorie consumption. Fat pads only lose volume based on your genetic time clock, for example if your mother aged slowly its most likely because her family line has fat pads programed to lose volume in the later years of life.  The only time fat pads loose volume outside of genetic heritage is during extreme calorie deficits but return to normal with adequate calorie consumption.  Whereas, when fat cells in the face get bigger, your face becomes more round, facial contours get lost and start to round out and disappear.  Your face is getting bigger, but less structured.  A provider who understands depth, placement, and associated size of fat pads specific to your genetic parameters replaces the lost volume secondary to aging to restore your face’s lost youthful contours, giving you back the structure and natural facial harmony of youth.   

Bone Loss

The litmus test for hormone balance.  Bone loss affects both men and women in the face, with both having about equal steady decline through the first five decades of life.  Bone is the hard, static structure that holds up the scaffolding of the face, and in the body, provides support for the tissues and organs. Bone loss is an equal player with the other 4 aging parameters, but not for women at the fifth decade. Bone is constantly regenerating and breaking down. Nutrition, mechanical stress, and weight bearing exercise determine how well our bones regenerate.  This is why the bones of the face tend to only degenerate when they are not exposed to stressors that yield full regenerative outcomes.  There is one component that is often overlooked, hormones, and the proof unfortunately is evident every day as you or your female relatives enter menopause and age more rapidly in the first two years of this new era than any other time in their life, why? Both Estrogen and Progesterone levels drop significantly at this time, with testosterone already in a state of deficiency long before menopause.  These hormones are the protectors of our bones, the ones that keep them in balance even with less than adequate nutrition, mechanical stress and weight bearing exercises.  Now the bones have even less protection and rapidly start to get reabsorbed by the body, and repair incompletely, leading to osteopenia, osteoporosis, and general weakening for many, post menopause.  Fillers can compensate for this loss, but long-term solutions are needed, such as bioidentical hormone replacement, exercise and optimizing our nutrition to keep this issue at bay.   

Muscle Atrophy

(Treatment- Muscle Facelift) previously, no true intervention for this aging parameter existed outside of facial exercises which relied on perfect technique, 2-3 times daily, with less than adequate outcomes, or surgery.  Now there is a procedure, using a device that mimics a strong muscular contraction, resulting in an increase in muscle tone.  This is the Muscle Facelift, but it goes beyond increasing tonality and lifting the facial envelope. Our advanced providers can target specific muscles, creating specific vector pulls which can be targeted to lift and improved facial dynamics. The result is a more youthful appearance, but also increasing the tone of specific muscles could address eye bag protrusion, up turn the corners of the mouth, arch eye brows without toxin, improve and tone the jaw and neck.  

Mucosal Wasting

Similar to bone, the mucosa has strong ties to hormone health.  Mucosa is the tissue inside the mouth, the red of the lip, the tissue of the sexual organs and the rectum.  With age and with drops in sex hormones these tissues thin, dry out, and waste away.  This is a major contributor to why our lips shrink as we age. Filler can address the volume loss; hormone replacement can deal with the rest of the issues from within.