Question:
How effective are laser skin resurfacing procedures? What exactly do they do?
Answer:
That question could take a long time to answer, but the short answer is it depends. Many different lasers are available for skin resurfacing or collagen building. In my opinion however if you are going to see results you have to use an ablative type laser to get the job done. The most common lasers to do this are Erbium or carbon dioxide. There are many different types of lasers in these classes including Fraxel, Matix, Dot, Active and Deep FX etc. The treatment can also be fully ablative where the outer layer of skin is removed in its entirety or they can be fractionated where a portion of the tissue is removed. Fractionated treatments are more common today because the results are still quite good, but the recovery is much less than traditional fully ablative techniques. All of these lasers are essentially heating the water content of the skin so that the skin is stripped off and replaced by deeper skin cells that have less sun damage. These procedures also work to increase collagen production.
Posted by Dr. Buckingham
