Beauty Doc Blog

The trend this coming year is towards facial rejuvenation using reliable and effective approaches that have proven themselves to work after last year’s disappointment by many people with so called lunch hour and weekend cosmetic surgery procedures. Many people fund themselves frustrated as well as disappointed with procedures that were both expensive and only minimally effective, but thought to be rapid solutions. No more of that this year. People want predictable results. The economy has slowed down a bit, but people still want to look as good as they can and they expect to get what they have paid for, quality results.

Specific trends in 2008 include:

A return to tried and true methods. Traditional procedures will replace  shortcuts. Most people believe that the time invested pays off in the long run. Additionally the safety of established  procedures is  high taking away the concerns that many people had in times past. Healing times have increased, and the time spent in the eyes of many might as well be spent on the method that works the best.

New fillers are also hitting the market. They last longer without the need for skin testing, and many new types of filler have been  released to treat the fine facial lines and wrinkles that eluded Botox. Some of the results will last a year or even longer. Also the recovery times for many is short, sometimes just a few hours.

Laser technologies continue to progress and gain popularity, but the most talked about innovation is a new way to deliver energy to the area under the skin. Smartlip is a prime example of a technology that uses a laser to melt fat beneath the skin rapidly and effectively with only a small incision. There will be more refinements during the coming year in the way lasers are used.

Many people have expressed displeasure with the threadlit treatment of facial sutures, a technology that was hyped as a replacement for traditional facelifts. However, the results are not what they should be and this coming year more and more people will return to the tried and true method. Another disappointment has been many of the skin conditioning procedures including IPL, Fraxel and Thermage. About 50 percent of those who have had the procedures and please and the other half are not, and in fact can’t tell that anything was done. The end result this year is a return to traditionalism.