Tweak of the Week: HydraFacial

HydraFacial is one of the best-known advanced facials around. It has become super popular for its hydradermabrasion technology and multi-step system that’s designed to cleanse, extract and hydrate the skin.

Taking selfies with all the gunk that is extracted during the process has become a social media phenomenon, but there’s a lot more to HydraFacial than finding out just how grubby your skin was before the treatment.

To show just what a HydraFacial can do and how well it works for all ages, skin tones and skin types, I brought Pri, Matthew, Si Yau and Monika from the Tweakments team along to the HydraFacial flagship in London. I’ve experienced HydraFacial before, but no one else had tried it, so I was keen to find out what they thought.

Price: From £125, depending on clinic and location
Pain Levels: None
Downtime: None

To find your closest HydraFacial provider, click here.

This video is sponsored by HydraFacial 

Everyone was curious to see how the treatment could work on their individual concerns – ranging from pollution damage, blackheads and oiliness to large pores and dullness.

What does HydraFacial do?The special tips that touch the skin – called HydroPeel Tips – are where the magic happens. Working with HydraFacial’s vacuum technology and serums, the tips create a vortex effect to easily dislodge and remove impurities while simultaneously delivering hydrating skin solutions. Different treatment tips are used for the various parts of the HydraFacial process:

• Cleanse + peel – Gentle exfoliation and relaxing resurfacing using glycolic and salicylic acids.
• Extract + hydrate – Painless suction removes debris from pores, and skin is nourished with intense moisturisers.
• Fuse + protect – The skin’s surface is saturated with antioxidants and peptides to give a gorgeous glow.The Platinum version of the treatment also incorporates lymphatic drainage and LED light therapy to stimulate circulation and promote collagen production, and a HydraFacial can also be personalised and upgraded with a variety of patented boosters from well-known skincare brands like Murad, and cosmeceutical brands such as Epicutis and Circadia. For me, we chose the Murad Regen GF booster, packed full of proteins to boost my collagen and elastin production.

All these options for customisation mean HydraFacial is suitable for more oily skins like Pri’s, and more sensitive skins like Monika’s. Si Yau, the youngest in the team, was interested to learn that HydraFacial isn’t just a one-off treatment but can also be used as a monthly reboot for your skin.

I loved the lymphatic drainage part of the treatment. Lymphatic drainage is really key to general health but it’s something a lot of us don’t pay any attention to, so it’s great to have a bit of it included in your monthly facial. My therapist performed light movements across my face towards the lymph nodes in my neck, encouraging the elimination of the toxins that the lymph system removes from our bodies.

She then swept over my skin with both infrared and blue LED lights. The infrared gives a boost to circulation and cell renewal, so it’s good for scarring, pigmentation, and fine lines; while the blue LED is antibacterial, so it’s helpful for killing any sort of bacteria that’s on the skin that could cause breakouts.

The team were all really impressed – even Matthew, who had never had a facial in his life – and we were all ridiculously excited to see what our skin looked like afterwards and compare just how many gunky bits of skin debris we had each shed – which can contain all sorts of interesting and gross things like sebum, fake tan, residue from make-up, cigarette smoke and even skin mites – and how the pores on the sides of our noses were so clean that they were invisible. And despite a little initial redness which is to be expected, we were all left smooth and glowing afterwards.

In the days that followed we remarked how smooth our skin felt, and the oilier members of the team noticed a visible mattifying effect on areas of their faces that usually get shiny throughout the day.

To find your closest HydraFacial provider, click here.

This video is sponsored by HydraFacial