Is your friend looking decidedly fresher and glossier? Did her dark circles suddenly disappear or did she grow a more defined nose overnight?
Quick, discreet, more affordable and often offering instant pay-off, non-surgical procedures or skin ‘tweaks’ are not about altering your face dramatically, but freshening it up in a subtle way. When done well, a tweakment offers the ideal balance of correction, with a natural result. For many of us, endless hours spent on video calls has made us more aware of how we look when speaking – no angle has gone unnoticed. ‘Zoom has made us all scrutinise our faces more closely than we used to,’ says independent aesthetics expert Alice Hart-Davis. ‘We would never spend that long looking in the mirror every day wearing our “concentrating” faces, and being obliged to watch ourselves on screen has made us all too aware of how we look, and to focus on our worst features.’ So it’s no surprise that the demand for non-surgical treatments has boomed. Here are some of the most popular ones.
1. ISSUE: Double chin and jowls
NEW FIX: Fat freezing or facial cryolipolysis
These wobbly additions to the face can be helped by tackling the fat underneath the chin. Freezing fat may sound rather strange, but the reasoning behind it is that if living fat cells are chilled below 4oC, they die. The most popular fat-freezing procedure is CoolSculpting, which delivers precisely controlled cooling to target the fat cells underneath the skin. Treated ones are crystallised (frozen), destroyed and then, over time, your body naturally processes the fat and eliminates these dead cells.
✣ WILL IT HURT? As the cooling begins during the first few minutes, you feel intense cold. This should soon dissipate. With some applicators, you’ll feel some pulling as suction is applied.
✣ DOWNTIME Afterwards, you may feel tingling as the area is massaged.
✣ WHEN YOU WILL SEE RESULTS From two months.
✣ BOOK za.coolsculpting.com
2. ISSUE: Dull, drab and dehydrated skin
NEW FIX: Injectable moisturiser
Something a lot of us may be suffering from at the moment is a less-than-glowy complexion, thanks to cooler weather and added stress of the past year. The latest injectable skin boosters promise brighter, bouncier and even-textured skin – a supercharged facial working its magic from the inside out, boosting moisture and luminosity. The result? Younger, plumper-looking skin. Saypha (pronounced ‘safer’) works by injecting teeny-tiny amounts of hyaluronic acid
(a naturally occurring substance in the body) superficially into your skin to help with skin tone and boost moisture and luminosity. It also has the added benefit of helping to firm and tighten too. Two to three treatments (five injections on either side of your face) are administered one month apart, followed by a treatment every three to six months to maintain your results.
✣ WILL IT HURT? It may feel a little uncomfortable during the process, but the treatment is tolerable as very fine needles are used.
✣ DOWNTIME Redness, swelling and pin-prick bruising could take 48 hours to settle.
✣ WHEN YOU WILL SEE RESULTS Instantly, but two months to see final effects.
✣ BOOK skinrenewal.co.za
3. ISSUE: Straighter nose
NEW FIX: Liquid nose job
First things first, no nose is perfectly straight – and this is 100% normal, but if you are unhappy with your profile, a non-surgical nose augmentation usinginjectable fillers can be used to help reshape it. By adding volume to certain areas, a good practitioner can help bumps, dips and wonky bridges to be less visible. It’s a quick and pain-free treatment – and a lot cheaper and less scary than undergoing surgery. You’ll see results straightaway but it does only last about one year, so it could become a rather expensive habit.
✣ WILL IT HURT? A numbing cream will be applied for minimal discomfort.
✣ DOWNTIME A few days.
✣ WHEN YOU WILL SEE RESULTS Immediately.
✣ BOOK skinrenewal.co.za
4. ISSUE: Pigmentation
NEW FIX: IPL therapy
If you’re fed up with spending a small fortune on concealers and foundations to cover up uneven skin tone and age spots, consider investing in Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) therapy instead. Using a collection of different wavelengths of light to remove specific pigments in the skin, it’s a lightning fast way to tackle any pigmentation. The Lumecca IPL therapy utilises photothermolysis, a method of applying intense pulsed lights, targeting pigmentation and redness caused by sun damage. It’s one of the most powerful treatments for this purpose. Dr Marisa Heyns, a general practitioner who specialises in aesthetic medicine, cautions that these types of therapies are ‘very much operator dependant, so it is important to ensure your practitioner is qualified to do such treatments’.
✣ WILL IT HURT? It will feel warm and as though a rubber band is being snapped gently on your face.
✣ DOWNTIME Your face may feel a little sunburnt for around 20 minutes after the treatment.
✣ WHEN YOU WILL SEE RESULTS After three to four sessions.
✣ BOOK drnerinawilkinson.co.za
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
The goal is to achieve subtle improvements that are undetectable yet noticeable, and even though the ‘tweak’ is minor, it’s still a medical procedure and should not be taken lightly. So do your research. A recommendation is gold, but swot up online and, if needles are involved, make sure your practitioner is registered at aprassa.co.za or aestheticdoctors.co.za.
