Your skin can take a beating over the years. Environmental factors like too much sun can dry out your skin and leave it looking like parchment or leather, complete with a growing number of fine lines. Or maybe you’re a smoker, and this habit has taken its toll on your face. Possibly, a poor diet has not given your skin — which is your body’s largest organ — the nourishment it needs to be healthy.
Just like lifestyle choices can contribute to the development of these wrinkles, you have the choice of reducing or reversing these unhealthy signs of aging. You can combat them with a process called a chemical peel on just about any area of your skin where you develop fine wrinkles: your face, neck, hands, arms, chest, and legs. Just like it sounds, a chemical peel uses a combination of chemicals to break down the skin. The damaged skin is then removed and healthier skin will grow back in its place.
A chemical peel offers an excellent treatment option for dealing with wrinkles that are defined as “static.” These are the finer lines that occur when your skin loses its elasticity. They most often occur around the eyes and cheeks. Static wrinkles are characterized by tiny lines that criss-cross and create a web-like texture, also called “crepiness” (pronounced cray-pee-ness, NOT creepy-ness!). These wrinkles are caused by damage to the top layer of skin, or epidermis. So, it makes sense that if you remove these layers, you can uncover skin that has not yet been harmed by external factors. With a chemical peel, you can literally peel away years of aging.
You can choose from different levels of peels, from a light or superficial treatment to a deep peel. A very light peel uses a gentle combination of glycolic acid and a 10 to 20% tricholoracetic acid (TCA). This solution penetrates only the top layer of skin, and is comparable to exfoliating the dead skin cells. It can be done easily in your doctor’s office, with minimal discomfort, in about half an hour. With this mild treatment, you can expect subtle results.
A light peel uses 70% glycolic acid and 25 to 35% TCA, slightly more potent than the superficial peel. This level of chemical peel affects the entire epidermis, not just the dead cells on the uppermost layer. You’ll feel some slight burning during the procedure and experience a little redness for a day or two. Because both the very light and light peels are relatively gentle, they can be repeated every month or so.
A more substantial peel — called a medium peel — uses a more powerful solution to go more deeply into the layers of your skin, permeating the epidermis to the dermis. The upper layer of your skin is primarily water, while the dermis contains much more: collagen, elastin, blood and lymph vessels, hair follicles, and both sweat and sebaceous glands. Collagen and elastin control the strength and elasticity of your skin. A chemical peel that reaches this deeply not only promotes new skin growth but also boosts the production of these essential proteins. The medium peel is a more intensive procedure and your doctor might suggest light anesthesia. Afterwards, expect redness in the treated area for about seven to nine days, and you’ll probably need a topical cream or ointment to protect the exposed skin from infection.
A deep peel produces the most dramatic results, with the chemicals penetrating further into the dermis layer. The procedure requires about 90 minutes and requires that you have general anesthesia as well as heart monitoring. To minimize the risk of infection to the raw, exposed skin, your treated areas will be bandaged for about two weeks. You can expect healing to take up to a month, but the results can last for years.
With any peel, you should expect a degree of burning sensation that is comparable to the level you’re undergoing. Be careful to stay out of the sun after a peel because your skin will be particularly sensitive to those harmful rays. Also, the medium and deep chemical peels aren’t recommended for people with darker skin.
A chemical peel poses a great and relatively simple method for giving your skin a fresh start. But there are some skin problems that are unlikely to benefit from this procedure, at any level. Those wrinkles on your forehead and between your brows are known as “dynamic”; they are caused by contractions beneath the dermis that weaken the skin. Excessive squinting, for example, creates a deeper crease between the eyebrows or “crow’s feet” at the outside corners of your eyes. Dynamic wrinkles can be treated, but a chemical peel is probably not the most effective choice, because the root of the problem reaches down to the muscles; peeling away layers of skin won’t treat the true cause.
Talk to your dermatologist or cosmetic surgeon to learn more about static wrinkles and chemical peels.
