Thinking about Ultherapy (I’m 50). I’ve just read that after age 57 there is no collagen left to stimulate. What are your thoughts on this? Is Ultherapy something you would recommend for the long term or is there an age it would stop working?

Great question. The really unfair thing about collagen-stimulating with energy-based tweakments (laser, radiofrequency, ultrasound) is that they work best on people who have more collagen in their skin, i.e. people in their 30s who barely need the treatments… and the older we get, the less collagen we have in our skin, and the less impressive a result we will get. We’re losing collagen in the skin from the age of 25, and as women go through menopause our natural production of collagen tails off drastically (unless we take HRT).

So it’s not that you don’t have any collagen left in your skin by the age of 57, but you’ll have an awful lot less of it than you had a decade earlier. So, to get back to your original question, yes, in the hands of a great practitioner, Ultherapy is a good treatment for tightening the skin – though all practitioners who use it tell me that picking patients for whom it’s appropriate is key to getting good results. Ask your practitioner if they think you’re someone that Ultherapy would work well for you, and go from there.