The Real Reason Your Skin Loses Volume

Hi, I'm Dr Maureen Allem, and today we'll discuss why people get aesthetic and skin treatments. So I have a very interesting observation. I attended the IMCAS in Paris a few months ago, and I attended the skin health lectures, and there was a Harvard professor who was busy explaining how important skin health is and how one has to ensure that your skin health remains in tip-top condition, and how she explained it, and the penny really dropped. She said that when you know you live in these blue zones where people become centenarians, they live till a hundred. She says they do everything right: they eat the correct food, they do the puns, phenols, they exercise, they walk up hills, they get enough sleep, they live till a hundred. But she says when you actually look at photos of these centenarians, they look like they're 100. So that's why it's so important to start now with skin health, because it's very important to have a wonderful lifestyle because that keeps everything else going. But intrinsic ageing happens with time. You start losing bone; you start losing the deep fat pads that keep your skin plump. You lose collagen at 1% per year. Your skin dries out at 1%. You use muscle; thank goodness it's not 1%, it's a quarter of a percent every year, but it all adds up. So by the time that you get to 60, you've lost two hundred cubic centimetres of volume, and that's why it's so important, number one, to do your volumization fillers, using fillers that are safe and don't often cause problems down the line. And also, really, botulinum is great; it makes you feel better and modulates your emotional responses. So that's also part of our anti-ageing pillars lifestyle being the foundation, as I said before. But it's the intrinsic treatments that give you that glow, stimulate collagen, and keep those zombie senescent cells at bay. As we get older, we have cells that just don't want to die off. And that's what our treatments do: they improve the senescent cells in our skin and stimulate collagen and just, you know, give you increased hydration in the skin. And as I said, there are numerous treatments that we can do to stimulate collagen. And when you want to stimulate collagen in your skin, you have to do something to the skin. Because when you prick the skin with carbon dioxide, that's called microdermabrasion. Or you put a laser on the skin, or you do skin removal, or you do heating of the skin with radiofrequency. What you're doing is causing controlled inflammation in the skin. And that controlled inflammation stimulates your fibroblasts, which come in much later, but you never have to explain it. When you cut your hand and open the skin, how does that skin eventually close? It works the same way. You get inflammation, controlled inflammation. Then you get proliferation of the cells that make collagen. And then you get remodelling of that collagen. So on the cut, you'll get further tightening of the cut. But on the face, you'll get tightening of the skin over the treated area. That's why it's so important to maintain your skin health. Because, hey, we wear our skin every day. I mean, when we step out, we have to put our best face forward. So it's so important to get that amazing collagen content, keep it going, prevent it from deteriorating to a point where you look again, you've got all these deep lines and wrinkles, and you've got the redness. And that's what the incoming treatments do. Keep your skin in shape so you can face the future.