Ask Alice

Hi, it sounds like you are taking great care of your skin. I’d always suggest a consistent skincare regime with active ingredients like vitamin C serum in the morning to brighten and strengthen the skin, plus a hydrating sunscreen, and retinol or another kind of retinoid at night to stimulate collagen boosting and improve skin texture.

CoolSculpting aka fat freezing or crylipolysis can be really helpful for shrinking fat below the jaw – you need an expert practitioner to assess your face and jawline and see if you would be a good candidate for this. They also need to explain the potential complications of the procedure, which is something lots of people are asking about since Linda Evangelista has talked about how CoolSculpting went wrong for her.

When it comes to finding a practitioner in your local area, have you taken a look at the practitioner finder on the site here?  These are all people whom I would trust with my face. You can put in your postcode and see who comes up.

Hi, there are a few treatments you could try to tighten the skin on the eyelids and around the eye area. None of these will give as quick, clean or definitive a result as eyelid surgery (blepharoplasty) but they could help.

• Ping, a radiofrequency skin-tightening protocol put together by Dr Sach Mohan, which is specifically designed for non-surgical skin tightening around the eye
• Laser skin tightening, with a fractional laser – practitioners including Dr Maryam Zamani can offer this with the Sciton laser, other practitioners will have their own favourites. You do need to wear intra-ocular shields for this procedure, which are like metal or plastic contact lenses slipped into the eye to protect it while the laser light works on the skin.
• Tixel, which is a device that generates plain heat energy (as opposed to light energy or radiofrequency energy) can also be used on the eyelids as well as around the eye. I had good results from just one treatment of this a few years ago.
• You could also try anti-wrinkle injections in the forehead, to raise your eyebrows a bit, which can make saggy eyelids look less saggy.

Hi, all of these injectable moisture treatments such as Profhilo and Belotero Revive and Juvederm Volite are great for delivering a deep and lasting hydration which enables the skin to rejuvenate itself  (make more collagen, tighten up a bit etc) and Pluryal is a decent brand though I haven’t tried it myself. It’s different in that it contains a cocktail of antioxidant ingredients as well as hyaluronic acid, which makes it a bit more like a mesotherapy mix, but a properly hydrating one. Ask your practitioner why they are suggesting that particular brand, and if you are satisfied with the answer give it a try.

Hi, short answer – no. these are two very different treatments. Yes they both work by stimulating collagen production in the skin, but they work in different ways.

The Dermalux Flex is using red LED light to gently rejuvenate the skin, by improving hydration, prompting the development of more collagen and reducing inflammation in the skin so it takes down redness and also reducing uneven brown pigmentation. As you say, the benefits are cumulative, so you need to use it consistently – and the more the better.

Morpheus8 and other forms of radiofrequency microneedling  cause huge immediate damage to the skin, by creating thousands of pinprick holes with the needling (so your skin races into healing mode, to repair that damage which results in fresher, stronger skin), and by heating the collagen within the skin with radiofrequency energy, which causes it to shrink, and then regenerate over the next few months, so you get a much more drastic tightening and smoothing than with Dermalux

Having said that, Dermalux will – as you may have seen on my videos — give you terrific results over time and is something you can use as regularly as you have time if you have the device at home. And it’s great for accelerating the healing process after any other tweakments.

Q&As on Dermalux Flex here 

Why I’ve added Dermalux Flex to the shop on TTG

Yes I do. I totally understand why you’re cautious about having filler in your tear-trough area to treat under-eye hollows, but if it is well done, this is a brilliant treatment to disguise the appearance of those hollows.

Take a look at this video where Dr Saleena Zimri is demonstrating a tear trough procedure

And take a look at this page which is all about hollow eyes and what you can try – scroll down the page to see all the FAQs

I prefer Ultherapy (Ulthera) to other types of HIFU skin tightening as it has a visualiser in the device so the practitioner can “see” into the skin and position each pulse at the right depth so it hits the collagen layer, not the fat.

I’d leave it to your practitioner’s artistic judgement. There’s a popular saying in aesthetic medicine, that why you go to see a great practitioner is because you are paying for ‘the skill, not the ml’. ie you want them to use their artistic eye to judge what is appropriate for you, bearing in mind the size of your lips, and what the rest of your face looks like, rather than just using up what they have in the syringe, regardless.

Yes, there is always a risk of bruising with any needle-based procedure, however good your practitioner is. If the needle nicks a tiny blood vessel… it’s just bad luck.

Jalupro I don’t know; Sunekos I’ve tried. It is made with concentrated amino acids to stimulate growth/repair in the skin, whereas Profhilo, Juvederm Volite, Teoxane Redensity 1, Belotero Revive and Restylane Skinboosters—which are all different brands of ‘injectable moisture treatment’, or ‘skinboosters’ as they are collectively known—use a fluid form of hyaluronic acid gel to hydrate the skin from the inside and encourage it to produce new collagen and elastin. So Sunekos and Profhilo (and the other HA Skinboosters) are aiming at similar effects, but via different routes.

Sunekos didn’t work for me—I had four sessions, with terrible bruising from the first, and unfortunately saw no noticeable improvements, and the brand asked me not to post the video I made about the procedure.