Hot takes from the Monaco AMWC

I’ve just spent three days at the Anti-ageing Medicine World Congress meeting (AMWC) in Monaco along with 8,000 other delegates and speakers (it’s the biggest global meeting of its kind), learning about what’s new in tweakments, and hearing the world’s best practitioners sharing their expertise. What did I learn? Here are my hot takes.

These machines have designs on your face

If you’ve not tried a ‘mechanised facial’ it’s time you had a go. Tweakments practitioners absolutely love these machines and some insist patients have a session with them to encourage their skin into better condition before they start on any more challenging procedures. Hydrafacial, which has been gaining popularity for years, uses a whirling vortex of water and different treatment heads to exfoliate the skin, extract excitingly horrible quantities of gunk from the pores, and leave it smooth and glowing.  Newcomers include Skin Storm from Crystal Clear, which again resurfaces and peels, then infuses oxygen and serums, and microneedles them into the skin before calming everything down with LED light. Also new is Préime Dermafacial, which adds skin-tightening radiofrequency, microcurrent or ultrasound after deep-cleansing, and already claims to be the world’s most advanced aesthetic facial device – expect to see this popping up in the UK soon.

Tired Face is a real thing, and it’s global

We know all about ‘Zoom face’ thanks to the pandemic, and we know about feeling tired-all-the-time. Dr Uliana Gout gave a fascinating presentation pointing out that ‘tired face’ is a phenomenon that practitioners are seeing all around the world. It’s the eyes that give the game away, she says, so freshening the eye area while softening the curve of the cheek (with injections of fillers and toxin, and energy devices like lasers, etc.) can help to tackle giveaway signs of fatigue.

Strap in for body sculpting

The past few years have seen a number of aesthetic muscle-toning systems that force high-intensity electromagnetic pulses into muscle fibres to make them contract at a seemingly impossible rate, the equivalent of doing 20,000 abdominal crunches, or squats, in a treatment session. Now, the new Emsculpt Neo adds fat-melting radiofrequency into the mix, so you can tone your abs and reduce the fat that’s stopping them from showing at the same time.  I haven’t tried the Neo yet but practitioners who use it tell me it’s fab (though I bet it’s not massively comfortable, having that much energy zapped into your muscles).

Then there’s the new Emerald Laser from Erchonia which claims gentle fat-busting with absolutely no discomfort, using low-level laser therapy. This makes the fat-cells leaky, so they shrink, and then your body can disperse that released fat. This sounds unlikely, but the device has very decent clinical studies showing that it can do what it claims, and Georgia, who’s the editor here at The Tweakments Guide, has tried it and saw improvements.

Another hot tip is B-Force from the Baldan Group, which uses high-intensity electromagnetic frequencies, plus radiofrequency (like the Neo) which puts even more energy into your unwary muscles (equivalent to 36,000 contractions per session). I didn’t spot this while snooping around AMWC but I know that Professor Bob Khanna really rates the system and has been getting great results with it in his clinic.

New ways with ultrasound

You may have heard about HIFU – which stands for high-intensity focused ultrasound – which can be used to tighten the skin, in systems like Ultherapy and Ultracel.

Well, there’s a newcomer in the area, Sofwave, and practitioners are raving about its ability to lift and tighten the skin without causing pain (pain is always a hazard with devices that are trying to cram a lot of energy into the skin, whether that’s light energy/ laser, or radiofrequency energy, or plain heat). Again, I haven’t tried this yet but I’m very curious.

The other thing that’s huge is ultrasound imaging, where practitioners use a small, handheld ultrasound device to look ‘into’ the area of skin that they’re about to treat. Why? So that they can see precisely at what depth in the skin their needle-tip is about to land, say, or how thick the skin is, or whether there are any blobs of old filler around that they might need to dissolve…

If I can help explain more about any of these new treatments and technologies, just give me a shout by submitting a question via Ask Alice, or join me for my next fortnightly IG Live with TTG editor Georgia, where you can ask away then and there. Make sure you’re following us on Instagram to get notified of when we’re going live.