Ask Alice

Hi, so glad to hear that Altrient C works for you, too, and yes, absolutely, you will still see results on 1 x sachet a day. Taking three doses daily for three months is the way to get the maximum results most quickly – that was the regime I followed when trialling the product, because that was the protocol for Atrient’s own trial with the product. But that trial found that after three months, there was no additional benefit to the skin of taking three a day so you might as well take two a day as a maintenance dose. One of my friends has only ever taken one a day but found that was plenty to strengthen her skin and help heal the cracked fingertips she always suffered with during the winter. And one a day is brilliant for supporting our immune systems, too.

Here’s the blog I wrote back in 2018 about trying Altrient

Here’s the link to Altrient C in the shop

Very very soon! Also, you can place an order online ahead of the stock arriving, so you’re first in the queue

Hi, no they’re not – though if some tweakments are the gold-standard most obvious thing for a particular concern, I try to point that out. It’s always really hard to say what is ‘best’ for any concern – and it depends to some extent on how your face is looking, how much you are bothered by the particular concern, how much money you are looking to spend on treatment, whether you are prepared to try more aggressive treatments that require more social downtime, and so on. Find a great practitioner (lots on the website here), have a thorough consultation with them about what they’d suggest for your concerns, take time to think about the options, and go from there.

Yes but I wish I hadn’t. If you ask me, it is completely mad that a treatment like this is even on offer. Do practitioners seriously think it’s a good idea to run multiple threads through the skin around the ankle? Have we all become so fixated on supposed imperfections that we are prepared to even contemplate something like this? Please, no!

We’re all usually short of vitamin D by mid-winter and the best thing to do is to use supplements as a matter of course – as they’re cheap and helpful. In the UK, the sun is only strong enough to create vitamin D in the skin between April and September, and then you have to weigh up whether you prefer to go with your face unprotected and take the damage that may cause to the skin. Using sunscreen doesn’t contribute much to low vitamin D as very few of us are scrupulous enough with our application of it to stop vitamin D synthesis altogether. I prefer to protect my face and, when it’s warm enough, expose my arms and legs to the sun, but whenever I’m tested, my vitamin D levels are always low.

Short answer – no, there are no non-surgical breast enhancements. There used to be one  – called Macrolane, like a mega-density filler, launched in 2008, but it was taken off the market a few years later because of all the problems it caused.

Sorry, but no. If you have a retrognathic chin, i.e. overbite/weak chin, you can have fillers to advance the profile a bit, but not the other way round.

What about Profhilo or one of the other injectable moisture/skin booster treatments? They are meant to have a slight tightening effect? That or BodyTite, which uses radiofrequency energy to tighten the skin.

Thanks so much for your kind words, at the moment they’re laminated by @suemarshlondon – which involves perming and tinting them to give them more volume and, er, presence! One day I will go to @iamrachelpitman who does very superior microblading.

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.

That is so hard to answer. Most of them are successful in their own way, i.e. a successful lip treatment is great but very different from a successful course of microneedling. Totally depends on what you’re after and what success looks like to you…

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.

It is a great treatment, you need to have a lot of them! Here is a Tweak of the Week video I did about the CACI treatment.