2023: My Year In Tweakments, Part 2

Continuing the recap of all the tweakments I tried in 2023, here’s what I got up to between July and December, from exosomes and low-level laser therapy to toxin, filler, RF needling, Skinboosters in my hands, and even PRP in my lips…

If you missed Part One – it’s here.

July – downtime

I’ve got three months to wait for the results of the NeoGen Plasma treatment to come through, so no tweakments for me: I spend the month wearing even more sunscreen than usual.

I do go and see the brilliant Shavata Singh to freshen up my eyelashes and eyebrows and have a lash perm and tint. Then, Shavata moves in with her cats-cradle of threads to refine the shape of my brows.

It’s the most peculiar sensation. It’s not painful, but it’s like having a small sharp-toothed caterpillar grazing its way across my skin, though what those threads are actually doing is hoicking the stray hairs out of their follicles, so it’s a long-lasting result. Along with a brow tint for added definition, don’t they look fab?

Shavata has brow studios all around the country. Threading, from £20; brow tints, from £19 (with Shavata, from £75 for threading, and £60 for tinting).

August – wrinkle-relaxing toxin

I was still waiting for the NeoGen results to develop, though I had some wrinkle-relaxing toxin with Dr Sophie Shotter. This isn’t going to affect the NeoGen results because it doesn’t affect skin quality, skin tightness or pigmentation which is what the Neogen Plasma is addressing.

I have these wrinkle-relaxing injections three or four times a year. They reduce my frown lines and crow’s feet lines, stop my mouth pulling down at the corners, soften the stringy bands of muscle in my neck and stop me grinding my teeth so much. Here’s the video of the treatment on Instagram, from last year.

Results: It all works a treat. I can still move my face, but the lines aren’t getting a chance to settle into furrows.

Wrinkle-relaxing injections with Dr Sophie Shotter, from £500. My treatment involves a lot of toxin (active muscles!) which adds up to more like £1,200. 

September: Purasomes – exosome skin-regeneration

One of the key buzzwords in aesthetic medicine this year has been exosomes – tiny messenger particles that carry ingredients between cells, which have huge potential for reviving the skin. The most potent ones are human-derived exosomes – perfectly legal in Korea, where they’re made, but not in the UK where human-derived products are banned by law. But other exosomes can impact human skin, such as these bovine-derived Purasomes from Italian manufacturer Dermoaroma. Treatment involves microneedling the exosome serum into the skin. Here’s a video of me having the treatment with Dr Anoob Pakkar-Hull and trying not to wince because I thought I could handle 0.5mm needles (short, as microneedling goes, only enough to get the product right into the skin) without numbing cream.

My skin looked fab once it calmed down from the needling, but I’m afraid I haven’t been able to fit in the follow-up treatments to tell you what sort of difference a course of three treatments would make.

Purasomes treatment, from £500 per session, with Dr Anoob Pakkar-Hull

September: Pain-free Fat Busting with the Emerald Laser

Off to Reading to visit Dr Bob Khanna and find out why he’s such a fan of the Emerald Laser, which has been stirring up huge interest thanks to its promise of painless fat-busting, which surely puts it in holy-grail-of-tweakments territory. It’s a low-level-laser which is why it doesn’t hurt. The light is green, hence the name, and in this video here, Dr Khanna explains what it’s doing and why it’s as much about wellbeing as fat loss (the light is giving all your cells more energy, which has all sorts of benefits).

Results: I haven’t had time for further treatments and fat loss is not one of my goals, but I especially loved the way the Emerald’s sister-device, the hand-held EVRL, eased muscle pain in my neck within minutes. I certainly want to know more about that. You can see what the EVRL looks like on the same video and there are some of Dr Khanna’s before and after pictures of his patients on there, too.

A course of Emerald Laser treatment costs from £2,200 at the Dr BK Clinic 

October: a touch of filler in my cheeks

I know, I know, there’s probably still buckets of filler in my cheeks. (If you don’t know what I’m on about, I had an MRI done in November 2021 which showed 30ml of HA filler in my face nearly four years after my previous treatment. You can read the story here). So, why would I go for more?

The thing is, filler or not, my face is doing its thing and ageing steadily, and one way in which that shows up is as a loss of volume in my mid-face. Dr Sophie Shotter took a look, and reckoned that where I’d really benefit from a little volume was in the apples of the cheeks, plus a touch in the chin, and to support the marionnette lines.

Results: In the pictures here, taken just before and just after treatment, you can see the way that slight amplification in my mid cheeks just softens the look of my face.

Cheek fillers with Dr Sophie Shotter, from £350

October: Sylfirm X – RF needling that can tighten saggy eyelids

Radiofrequency microneedling remains very popular for tightening and smoothing the skin, and Sylfirm X is the most popular brand of RF needling in the US. Now it is in the UK, of course I wanted to try it out.

What’s different about Sylfirm X is that it can be used to treat pigmentation as well as improve skin quality. It’s also much less painful than other brands, and on a shallow setting, the needling can be done right up to the lower eyelashes and across the eyelids, for a non-surgical eyelift.

In this video here, you can hear Dr Rita Rakus talking me through the hows and whys, and watch me trying the treatment which, yes, was comfortable. I had no numbing on my neck or decolletage, but I did ask for numbing cream on my face.

Results: My skin quality is pretty good after all this needling (a recent Visia image puts my skin age at 51; I’m 60), but I need to fit in another couple of sessions to see the tightening results.

Sylfirm, from £400 for face treatment, at the Dr Rita Rakus clinic

October: Skinboosters for Youthful Hands

My hands tend to miss out on all these tweakments, so I jumped at the chance to smooth and soften them with injections of Skinboosters. Launched 10 years ago, this is original hyaluronic-acid-based injectable moisturiser from Restylane. Dr Priya Chadha, who did the treatment, stressed that I must commit to three rounds of injections, each a month apart, to stimulate the growth of collagen and elastin in the skin and boost skin hydration, all of which will make the hands look better.

The treatment is quick – the product is injected just under the skin using a cannula (like a long blunt needle) which can nose its way through the back of the hands without stabbing holes in anything vital. With a tiny bit of numbing cream, it really didn’t hurt, although if you’re squeamish you probably won’t want to watch the cannula burrowing about beneath your skin. There’s no downtime too – my hands weren’t sore or swollen afterwards. Dr Priya also neatly injected some of the product into the backs of my fingers – an off-label use, i.e. not one approved by the manufacturers – which has worked wonders, so I don’t have fingers that look five years older than the backs of my hands. (First-world tweakment-tester problems, eh?).

Results: Fab. Skinboosters won’t fill out super-bony old hands in the way that injections of filler would do (because it’s a very fluid product, not a sturdy gel like a filler), but it has made a huge difference – the skin is smoother and less crepey, and the whole back of each hand looks plumper and softer, too. There’s a full video coming on this (not yet finalised/ released, sorry) but here are a couple of pics to show you the difference since the start of the treatment.

Skinboosters for hands, from £420-£550 per treatment, more information here. 

October: Regrowing my receding hairline

Tweakments for hair restoration – or rather, tweakments for hair restoration with decent scientific proof behind them – are one of the big trends for 2024.

At the Phi Clinic on Harley Street, Dr Tapan Patel explained why he is such a fan of the Calecim Advanced Hair System for improving hair density and volume. In short, because it’s giving great results for his patients (there are links to the clinical studies on the product here).

Female hair loss doesn’t get talked about much, but by menopause, up to half of all women will have issues with thinning hair or a receding hairline. I think I’m pretty lucky with my hair, but when I was put under the cameras it was clear that I’ve developed the characteristic bare patches at my temples that aesthetic nurse Libi Roos calls ‘the hormonal V’s’.

Calecim is a serum packed with growth factors and exosomes which needs to be microneedled into the scalp. Libi started me off with a treatment in clinic (not as painful as it sounds, video here) then sent me home with a six-week supply and I’ve been needling and applying it myself since then.

There has been lots of regrowth which is very exciting: these pictures are eight weeks apart and you can see the improvement in the amount of hair in the Vs. As I said before, I haven’t exactly got a major problem with hair loss; if you’d like to see more dramatic before-and-afters, there are some on here.

• Calecim Advanced Hair System – you can get the six-week kit for £267.75 via this link
• With clinical microneedling at the Phi Clinic, from £250 per session

November: No-filler Lip Booster

Now, what would make any sane person want to have PRP injected, and then microneedled, into their lips? Well, for people who don’t want filler in their lips, and who don’t want extra volume, it’s a natural alternative, explains Dr Surbhi Virmani as she extracts a vial of my blood to create the platelet-rich plasma. Quickly, while the PRP is fresh, she injects 1ml into each of my lips, and another 1ml into the crinkly barcode-lip-line zone above my upper lip, then spreads the remaining 2ml of PRP over my lips and uses a microneedling pen to drive it into the skin. Yes, that hurts,  even after strong numbing cream, but she calms the whole area with a freezing spray of marine exosomes which should help calm and heal the skin.

Results: With 3ml of PRP in them, my lips were hugely inflated straight after treatment, so I covered them up with a mask in public until they had subsided (24 hours). Six weeks later my lips feel firmer and better hydrated lips which is nice, though I think I could do with a bit of volume, too. Again, there are fab photos and a detailed report to come when a (different) newspaper publishes the story, but they are on hold until then.

Lip Service, £700, with Dr Surbhi Virmani

December: more toxin – and that’s a wrap!

Just the final session of Skinboosters in my hands, and regular toxin treatment: the month has flown by.

I also had toxin injections in my armpits, to stop them sweating. You might wonder why on earth anyone would want to have this done, and so did I until I tried it, and since then, I’ve been hooked. No sweating and no BO for eight months at a time? Yes please.

One thing I did remember to do was to take a video of how my face moves before and after the wrinkle-relaxing injections. I’ll load it up on Instagram very soon to give you an idea of how it softens the range of expressions in my face without wiping them out.

Armpit toxin with Dr Sophie Shotter, about £500

 

If you missed Part One of My Year in Tweakments, it’s here, with write-ups of:

• Keren Bartov superfacial
• Philip Kingsley Scalp Management
• LPG Endermologie
• HArmonyCa hybrid filler
• P3 ‘Photoshop for the Skin’
• Emsculpt Neo Edge
• Armpit Toxin
• Emsella chair pelvic floor strengthening
• Augustinus Bader facial with Lord Gavin
• Slimyonik lymphatic drainage
• NeoGen Plasma

Happy New Year!