Can skin wrinkles, age spots, and crepe-like skin (crepe-like skin is thin and is wrinkled like wrinkled crepe paper) be improved without the long recovery typical of invasive surgical treatments?

The answer is, “yes.”

However, for patients with severe sun damage and precancerous lesions the best option is to completely reverse facial skin damage with my RESET^® for Sun Damage. RESET is a ablative laser skin resurfacing treatment.

RESET for Sun Damage removes years of past sun damage and allows the skin to create new skin to replace the damaged skin. This creates amazing results and resets a patient’s skin to a healthier, younger state.

RESET uses the technology of Laser Skin Resurfacing and a proprietary healing protocol to reverse facial sun damage, and remove many pre-cancers—even some active skin cancers.

An Alternative

There are patients who don’t have the luxury of taking off approximately 10-14 days for the recovery needed for a RESET procedure.

Also, RESET for Sun Damage can only be used on the face and often patients have sun damage not only on their face but also on their neck, chest, legs, and arms and want to improve their skin on these areas as well.

To help my patients that aren’t able to take the necessary recovery time for the RESET procedure and to help patients treat sun damage on other parts of the body where RESET can’t be used, I’m happy to announce that my practice is offering HALO, a hybrid fractional laser.

Sciton’s HALO is a relatively new technology that can help patients reverse sun damage with a faster recovery period than the deep ablative resurfacing used in RESET.

In full ablative resurfacing like the RESET procedure the top layer of skin is removed and then the body grows new healthy skin back over a few weeks time. Although this creates great results as seen in the photo above, the procedure requires downtime.

How Does HALO Work?

HALO’s technology utilizes a concept known as profractional ablation.

Fractionated and Non-fractionated Lasers

In traditional profractionated or fractional resurfacing, small channels are created in the skin by ablation using the 2940 nm Erbium Laser while leaving other parts untreated.

HALO is a step above traditional fractional resurfacing and adds another wavelength to achieve even better results. In this way, it offers the best of both lasers: it can achieve superior ablative fractional results with a non ablative downtime. HALO allows the perfect alignment of the Ablative Erbium and the Non Ablative 1470nm in the same fractionated hole. This allows a more complete treatment than erbium alone and allows the deeper damage to be shed through the open channel above it. This is why the healing is much faster with HALO Dual Wavelength Resurfacing.

Halo can also achieve results in fewer treatments than past fractionated technologies. It is also a comfortable treatment with little to no downtime.

BBL and HALO Combined

Research from Stanford showed that Broad Based Light (BBL) can restore skin to a younger state. BBL is effective at improving skin pigment and removing redness on the face.

While BBL doesn’t provide the skin tightening that HALO does, combining HALO with the BBL treatment at the same time allows for even greater results to be achieved as compared to each treatment separately.

Brown and red spots can be targeted and improved first by BBL, and then HALO can work to tighten the skin and improve skin quality and crepiness.

The second improvement provided by HALO involves treating body areas other than the face.

The combination of ablative and non ablative technologies allows the safe treatment of areas other than the face.

We are excited to be able to help our patients achieve significant improvement in the quality of their skin on their face or other parts of their body, with a technology that provides a fast recovery. For patients with significant aged sun damaged skin, and wrinkles, RESET is still the best choice. However, patients with less wrinkled sun damaged skin or wrinkled sun damage skin on the neck, chest and other parts of the body, HALO offers the best of both worlds— great results and little downtime.