We want our skin to stay firm and taut, but that’s not what always happens. Once the skin begins to lose its bounce and suppleness, it’ll begin to sag in different body areas. Sagging skin is an unpleasant condition making us look tired and older. Surgical facelifts used to be the preferred option, but what if you can have a non-surgical sagging skin treatment that’s just as effective in reducing the appearance of loose skin?
What Causes Loose Skin?
While many different things impact the body and skin, below are a few of the most known and common factors that result in sagging skin.
- Aging
The most common reason for loose skin is aging, and surely, it is inevitable. As we get old, the body generates less elastin and collagen in your skin, both of which provide the skin with its natural elasticity and maintain its firmness. Elastin fibers are proteins helping the skin “bounce back” from doing facial expressions and stretching. Collagen is also a protein that creates the structure of the skin.
As you get old, the result of normal contraction and stretching from exposure to the life and elements is more permanent, resulting in loose skin that couldn’t bounce back by itself.
- Sun Exposure
It could impact your collagen and elasticity production, as well, but faster than aging. Sun damage due to UVA/UVB radiation could impact the skin’s DNA, resulting in premature cellular death. That destroys the elastin and collagen in the skin.
- Weight Loss
After you lose a lot of weight in a short period, you may lose a lot of volume in the skin. This is the fatty layer thinning beneath the skin as well as ligament straining. The faster you lose weight, the less time the skin has to recuperate, and sometimes it just requires a little more aid to adjust to your new body size.
- Smoking
Smoking, similar to sun exposure, can cause accelerated aging. Nicotine in cigarettes could cause the blood vessels in the skin’s outer layers to constrict. As a result, blood flow in the skin is affected, resulting in fewer nutrients and oxygen reaching your skin cells.
How to Treat Loose Skin
Most of us have sagging skin that we’d like to tighten, no matter if it’s due to age, substantial weight loss, pregnancy, or other circumstances. If you do not want to go under the knife, try one of these non-invasive sagging skin treatments that don’t cut the skin, resulting in little to minimal to zero downtime. A lot of these treatments take an hour or less to finish, and you might only need one or two to obtain satisfactory results:
Thermage
Thermage is a non-invasive radiofrequency technology that has been clinically proven to smooth, tighten, and smooth skin for a more youthful appearance. The treatment produces natural-looking outcomes with little to zero downtime in a single operation. Because there is no surgery involved, patients may usually resume their daily activities right after the operation.
How Does It Work?
A handpiece delivers Thermage’s innovative radio frequency technology with a smooth, flat tip, which securely warms the deep, collagen-rich skin layers. The heat tightens existing collagen and stimulates new collagen synthesis as time passes, reducing sagging, renewing contours, and improving the skin’s smoothness and texture.
HIFU
HIFU is a cosmetic procedure that uses ultrasonic energy to treat the skin layer underneath the surface. Ultrasonic heating produces fast heating of the skin tissues.
The cells are driven to induce cellular damage by being heated to a specific temperature. Collagen synthesis will be increased as a result of cellular injury. Collagen is a protein that’s necessary for skin structure to be maintained.
The skin will grow firmer and tighter as collagen synthesis increases. In addition, the number of wrinkles will decrease. The ultrasonic energy is focused on a specific area of the face to treat the tissues, thus, the patient wouldn’t encounter any more damage to the upper skin layer.
Dermal Fillers
Injectable dermal fillers mostly replace lost hyaluronic acid and collagen in your skin. That could assist in restoring your skin’s plumpness and resiliency, help eliminate or reduce wrinkles and lines and compensate for lost volume due to the loss of subcutaneous fat. They’re more useful at rejuvenating the appearance of parts of the face that have become hollow, for instance, the lower cheeks or underneath your eyes. They’re also particularly effective at smoothing fine lines surrounding your lips and eyes and lessening skin folds between your mouth or the sides of the nose. When utilized to tighten loose skin, dermal fillers that restore for lost volume could offer more natural-looking effects.
