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Concerns

Acne

Acne is one of the most common skin complaints out there, and one we’ve pretty much all had to deal with at one time or another. Some people are lucky and get away with a few spots in their teens, but for others it can be a nightmare experience lasting ten or twenty years and resulting in significant scarring. While there’s no cure for acne, there are a number of treatments which effectively manage it.

Acne Scarring

It’s pretty tricky to get through life without picking up a scar or two along the way. Cuts, burns, and surgeries can all leave a lasting mark. One of the less everyday, but still prevalent, causes of scarring is acne. But why does it happen, how can you prevent it, and how can you treat it?

Barcode Lip Lines

The ‘barcode’ lines are the little vertical lines above the upper lip that run vertically downward into the lip. These lip lines are also called ‘smoker’s lines’ – no prizes for guessing why – or, more formally, ‘perioral’ lip lines, where ‘peri’ means ‘around’ (rather than ‘genie’ or ‘fairy’ or something to do with Nandos) and ‘oral’ means ‘relating to the mouth’, as usual.

Crepey Skin

When our necks start looking old, it is a real heartsink. It’s that moment when you realise you aren’t imagining it; ageing really has crept up on you when you weren’t looking. The main culprits are crepey skin and neck wrinkles. They tend to go hand-in-hand, so I’ll cover them both in the same place here. There’s a good deal you can do to improve the appearance of your neck, especially if you are up for trying the latest tweakments.

Crow’s Feet Wrinkles

Crow’s feet are the fine lines that radiate out from the outer edges of your eyes. They’re often given other names, such as ‘laughter lines’ (or sometimes ‘laugh lines’), ‘character lines’, or ‘expression lines’.

Dark Circles

Dark circles are a real pain. They can make you look tired and drawn, even when you’re feeling bright and breezy. But what actually causes them? And what can you do about them? Read on to find out more…

Double Chin

If you have a bit of double chin and you’re not happy about it, what can you do? What causes a double chin in the first place? Don’t worry, there are a lot of options out there in tweakments land. Read on to find out more…

Drooping Nose Tip

As the name suggests, this is when the tip or point of your nose droops down. In medicine, this is called nasal ptosis. You’ll also sometimes hear it referred to as a ‘caudal nose tip’, where ‘caudal’ means ‘towards the tail end’.

Eye Bags

Eye bags—i.e. those saggy pouches underneath your lower eyelid—are often mentioned in people’s top 10 concerns. We always notice issues around the eyes first, like dark circles or crow’s feet, because we’ve evolved to make eye contact—both with others and with ourselves in the mirror. So what can you do about under-eye bags? Read on to find out…

Frown Lines

Frown lines, also known as ‘eleven’ lines (or ‘glabellar lines’, as doctors call them) are those vertical creases that appear between your eyebrows. We make these creases when we knit our brows together while frowning and, as we age, our skin loses the ability to bounce back, and the lines set in, particularly if frowning has become such a habit that we hardly know we’re doing it.

Hollow Eyes

What are hollow eyes? Hollow eyes, also known as sunken eyes, are when the under-eye skin appears dark and sunken, the socket appears large, and the eyes appear to be set deep in the socket. Some people just have hollow eyes, and have them from a young age—there’s a significant genetic component to this—but they’re … Continue reading “Hollow Eyes”

Jowls

It’s hard to find anyone who loves their jowls or welcomes these floppy, wobbly additions when they manifest. I get more questions about jowls and how to treat and minimise them than most other topics. What are the answers? Here goes.

Large Pores

Ideally, we would all like to have skin that’s smooth, firm, pliable, and nicely hydrated, with small, nearly-invisible pores. But some of us just have large pores – or, at least, pores that are much more visible than we’d like them to be and which contribute to making our skin look uneven in tone.

Marionette Lines

What are marionette lines? Marionette lines are lines that run down vertically from the corners of the mouth towards (or to) your chin. They get their name because if you imagine a wooden puppet or ventriloquist’s dummy, those are the lines where the mouth block would drop when it is ‘talking’.

Neck Wrinkles

When our necks start looking old, it is a real heartsink. It’s that moment when you realise you aren’t imagining it; ageing really has crept up on you when you weren’t looking. The main culprits are crepey skin and neck wrinkles. They tend to go hand-in-hand, so I’ll cover them both in the same place here. There’s a good deal you can do to improve the appearance of your neck, especially if you are up for trying the latest tweakments.

Pigmentation

Having even pigmentation means that your face looks fresh. This makes a good deal of sense when we think about how much money gets spent on concealer and foundation every year, which we use to make our skin tone look more consistent. However, we really sit up and take note when melanin starts to cluster together under the skin, showing up as patches or brown age spots. This clustering is called ‘hyperpigmentation’. You can also have a melanin deficiency, leading to ‘hypopigmentation’.

Redness

There are many reasons that your skin may be red, but ultimately what it comes down to is that something is causing there to be more red blood cells near the surface of your skin than normal. This happens because the nervous system dilates blood vessels in the face, which diverts blood to the skin of the face.

Rosacea

When there is a little bit of redness across your nose and cheeks — maybe not always, but more often than not — how do you know whether it is a normal, healthy bit of colour or whether it’s actually something of a problem? It can be hard to tell, given that we have all grown up thinking that ‘getting a bit of colour in our cheeks’ is a good thing.

Sensitive Skin

Sensitive skin is skin which consistently reacts to certain (often many) products or ingredients by becoming irritated—meaning it becomes red, dry, painful, and may feel ‘tight’. The term ‘sensitive skin’ almost always refers to some form of irritant contact dermatitis (ICD) – i.e. your skin being predisposed to become irritated when exposed to a certain ingredient or product. However, ‘sensitive skin’ also encompasses certain skin conditions such as rosacea, eczema, or polymorphous light eruption (PLE). Head over to the fact sheet about rosacea for more information if you think that might apply.

Sun Damage

When I say ‘sun damage’, I don’t mean sunburn or the peeling skin you see when someone has spent too long on the beach. I mean the unseen changes in your skin cells caused by ultraviolet radiation from the sun, otherwise known as UVA and UVB rays.

Thin Lips

One of the modern standards of beauty is full, pouting, richly coloured lips. Conversely, thin lips have traditionally—and unfairly!—been associated with cruel or miserly characters, like something from a Dickens novel. Accordingly, there are many products and services designed to give you luscious lips, but what would work for you? Read on to find out more.

Thread Veins

Thread veins are some of the unwelcome marks that age leaves on the skin. In a blatantly discriminatory fashion, thread veins seem to be much more common among women than men, which is apparently due to hormonal factors. Thread veins contribute to making the skin appear uneven in tone, which makes it look older.

Uneven Bridge

When most people talk about the ‘bridge’ of the nose, they’re usually referring to the length of the nose if you look at it front-on. In medical terms, that’s actually called the dorsum, with the bridge technically just referring to the bit between your eyes. On this page, I’ll talk about the bridge as it’s come to be used in modern parlance—the length of the nose front-on.