Skin damage. If you are over 40, your skin may be telling some tales about you--about your time as a smoker (lip lines), those long, lazy sun-worshipping summers (dry, rough skin, wrinkles, freckles and age spots), or perhaps you’re seeing a little more of Mom and Pop in the mirror each day than you’d care to. Yes, part of what you’re seeing is normal skin aging, but most of it is likely to be sun and other environmental damage. It’s ugly—and it’s not just on the surface, either.

Good news: Two revolutionary medical technologies with diverse approaches to skin resurfacing are merging their strengths: fractional laser technology and the CO2 laser. The two heavy-hitter beauty treatments are now being combined to provide a resurfacing and rejuvenating treatment that goes deeper into the skin than current conventional fractional laser treatments, while offering a safer treatment with considerably less social downtime and recovery than the traditional CO2 (carbon dioxide) ablation laser.

For the patient with deeper wrinkling and skin damage, the aesthetic physician’s gold-standard, until recently, has been the CO2 laser, because of its ability to vaporize the outermost layers of skin across a large surface area. After some recovery, the newly-generated skin is remarkably smoother and suppler. The other side of the CO2 coin is that that reward generally comes after 10 to 14 days or so of hiding away as a social pariah, the first few days of which one will likely benefit from a potent pain medication. The skin tends to retain a pinkish/reddish hue for months afterward (the longer the redness, the better the final result), and there is, naturally, with any larger, weeping and crusting open wound surface, risk of infection if an aftercare regimen is not carefully followed. Additionally, a small percentage of patients may experience permanent, delayed-onset skin whitening or excess skin pigmentation.

Now, enter fractional technology. The fractional scientific approach is predicated upon the body’s healing response to injury. By creating thousands of tiny, microscopic laser wounds, spaced in an even pattern across the skin, but leaving areas of healthy, untreated skin between them, the lower collagen layer of the dermis is stimulated to renew and repair. The surface of the skin now contains only microscopic surface wounds, instead of one large, red, oozing burn. With the fractional treatment, the evidence of the ongoing healing and rebuilding process is more subtle, taking place deep in the dermis (where there are less pain receptors), leaving the protective epidermal covering much more intact. After a few days (instead of weeks) of your face appearing sun-blistered, the skin will now gradually repair and rebuild itself from the inside outward, stimulated to produce a fresh, thicker and more resilient layer of collagen, which over the next few months will fill out more evenly, for a tighter, smoother and more uniform surface appearance. The DOT (Dermal Optical Thermolysis) CO2’s longer wavelength, combined with fractional laser technology takes the treatment deeper into the dermis than current, minimally-ablative fractional treatments can. The inherent risks of the CO2 laser are reduced considerably by implementing the fractional delivery, while the fractional treatment results are improved. Additionally, there are no known reports of any delayed skin whitening or excess skin pigmentation associated with the DOT CO2 fractional laser treatment.

SKINTASTIC™ currently offers the Fraxel™ SR1500, an advanced non-ablative fractional laser, for correction of mild to moderate sun damage, wrinkles and skin pigment irregularities. A patient generally receives 4 to 5 treatments with the current Fraxel technology. Jeffrey Adelglass, M.D., F.A.C.S., Medical Director and Chief of Surgery for SKINTASTIC states, “We have experienced excellent results with the Fraxel™ SR1500, and will continue to offer Fraxel™ in our medical spa. However, for our patients with skin conditions requiring more dramatic correction, we can now also treat with the new CO2 fractional, which is a safer, more comfortable treatment and recovery option than the traditional CO2 alone.”

Dr. Adelglass was one of the first Texas physicians to introduce this new CO2 laser technology, and SKINTASTIC™ was selected to be a National Training Center to instruct other physicians, largely due to Dr. Adelglass’ extensive experience with various skin lasers and other aesthetic science technology applications. Dr. Adelglass received his own first-hand, in-depth DOT Fractional CO2 training under one of the Italian physicians who originally developed the technology.