If you have some important events coming up in the next month or two, and you’re willing to make a commitment of time and effort to making your face look its very best, here are some tips and tricks to help you do that. First of all, and the most important thing, is you need to know your oil and water facial skin type. You need to know whether it’s dry or oily, normal or combination so you can buy the proper skin care products that will agree with and help you make your skin look its very best. Next, you need to adopt a daily skin care routine that you do every day, particularly involving cleanser and toner and moisturizer and whatever other appropriate skin care products you will be using which I will discuss in a few minutes. But certainly you want to use a cleanser and toner every day twice a day because, if you do the same thing every day and you prepare your skin in the same way every day, it will reproducibly be able to accept the active ingredients that you’re doing, and they’ll be able to work much more reliably and reproducibly. Make sure every day you are using the three essential skin care ingredients. They are sunscreen, exfoliant and antioxidants. The sunscreen every morning, rain or shine, because you want to prevent all future sun damage. The only way you can prematurely wrinkle your skin is to have it exposed to the sun without protection. Exfoliant every day to help remove the dead cells to improve the texture and to give it a luster, also to help improve the color and, in addition, you’ll help prevent acne breakouts and you’ll remove some of the early abnormal cells that want to become skin cancers in the future. And every night an antioxidant, because no matter how fastidiously you use your sunscreen and how regularly you re-apply it, somehow some sun manages to get around it or through it and to cause some high-energy particles inside your skin that can be dangerous. The antioxidants used at night will neutralize that dangerous energy and prevent it from damaging DNA or cell membranes which causes premature aging of the skin and contributes to skin cancer. Then, how about a trip to a dermatologist’s office. At your dermatologist’s, a series in that month or two months, a series of glycolic treatments or microdermabrasions will go a long way toward improving the color and texture of your skin, giving it even more of a luster. Botox and filler treatments will certainly have plenty of time to control any lines, wrinkles or contour issues. And lastly, if you have discolorations on your face that don’t respond to the others and the other treatments, certainly broken capillaries that cause redness can be removed with lasers or brown spots or age spots can also be removed with lasers. So, if you have a month or two, if you have the luxury of having that amount of time, it’s certainly very easy to get your skin into very, very good shape and to look its very best and, if you get caught at the last minute and you just have two or three days before that important event, see the other DermTV episodes on quick fixes, both at home and in your dermatologist’s office.
Are there laser or light treatments available for women of color? Thank you.