How to Help Thin Skin
Does that thinning, wrinkling skin on your neck bug you every time you turn your head in the mirror? (otherwise known as “tech neck”)?
Let’s address, “Why did it happen?” and “Why did it show up seemingly overnight?”
Thin and loose skin is a byproduct of the aging process, and three concurrent skin cell changes affect the firmness and tightness of skin: collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid.
As we age, collagen — a protein that makes up 80% of our skin and provides an underlying “structure,” — declines 1% a year starting in our early 20s. Imagine a house made of concrete blocks that begins to crumble over time, leaving behind gaps, holes, and loose spots. Collagen is like the concrete, and as it diminishes with age, our skin sags and sinks into the weakened foundation.
Meanwhile, elastin — which helps our external skin stay flexible and elastic — also declines in tandem with collagen and impacts our skin’s ability to “bounce back” from gravity, stretching, and pulling.
Finally, hyaluronic acid—a molecule that attracts water to our skin and makes it look plump and radiant in our youth—also suffers from age-related depletion. You can probably predict the effects: dry, dull and lined-looking skin.
This trifecta of cellular changes in both the internal and external layers of skin leads to drooping and sagging, especially around the eyes, brows, chin and neck. (Our bodies show the change, too: arms, knees and abdomen skin begins to look crepey and lax).
Add in other factors like weight fluctuations, pregnancy and hormonal changes, and aging skin can’t “keep up” with the sudden stretching, which leads to that shocked feeling of, “I woke up to this!”.
How to Prevent and Treat Thin Skin
There are two main ways to tackle your paper-thin skin predicament:
1. Prevention and protection — which boils down to sun protection, good medical grade skin care and a healthy diet. Topical Products – Topicals slow down the thinning of the skin and they offer some corrective benefits as well — but it’s a slower process than aesthetic treatments. When it comes to products scientifically proven to increase the production of collagen and reduce wrinkles, the keyword is retinol (Vitamin A) and tretinoin.
2. Thickening your skin through medical intervention or medical-grade skincare products.
For skin thickening, here are your options:
Lasers – More corrective than topical products, resurfacing lasers stimulate collagen and strengthen your skin’s dermis. Milder lasers like ResurFX cause just a day or two of pink skin, while fractionated CO2 lasers accomplish fast results with a single treatment and a week of downtime (think a bright red sunburn that needs vaseline applied for 5-7 days).
Radiofrequency Microneedling – Morpheus8 RF Microneedling creates physical microtrauma to the skin via gold plated pins, which stimulates collagen. Then, RF energy is directed into the skin to further stimulate additional new collagen that contours, smooths, and firms thin skin. Morpheus8 recovery is similar to ResurFX — a day or two of pink, puffy skin.
Microneedling PRF — Microneedles create tiny “channels” of injury, and the growth factors and healing goodness from your own body’s platelet rich fibrin (PRF) sink into these channels, well under the skin’s surface, which is part of what makes the combination PRF microneedling treatment more powerful than either procedure performed on its own.
Radiofrequency — The best results on thin skin come from combining multiple treatment modalities. Though treatments like Venus and Forma may not firm the skin as much as more invasive, heat-based treatments, they offer pretty amazing improvements even on their own. Combining these treatments with lasers or Morpheus8 assures the greatest improvement in your collagen and elastin production.
How to choose between lasers vs Morpheus8 vs PRF Microneedling or PRP Microneedling:
There’s no cut and dry answer on what modality is better because we make recommendations after evaluating a patient. In general, if someone needs more skin rejuvenation — improvements to skin color and smoother pores — we recommend lasers. If the goal is to smooth fine lines and wrinkles, we choose microneedling with PRP or PRF and if the goal is more contoured and firmer skin, Morpheus8 is better.
What’s the difference between Morpheus8 RF and Microneedling PRF?
Morpheus, with its radiofrequency heat, offers more skin tightening and contouring at a subdermal, structural level, while Microneedling PRF is preferred for collagen induction and surface-level smoothing and skin bounce.
We can help you choose. Book your complimentary consultation at https://cslcmichigan.janeapp.com/