Fraxel Laser Treatment: An Overview

So I had a question about what is fraxel? How much does it cost? What's it used for? What's kind of the aftercare? And that's a great question. So fraxel is a technology called fractional resurfacing, where the injury to the tissue occurs in little pieces. And there's two wavelengths. There's two different lasers inside. The fraxel laser, they actually call the machine the Fraxel dual. And the fraxel laser targets different layers of the skin. So there's one wavelength that goes very superficial, the outer layer of the skin. That so almost as like giving a very controlled peel to the skin, and that's called a 1927 wavelength. You don't know about that. And there's one that goes much deeper into the skin called a 1550 wavelength. You don't know that one either. I like talking about that. And the deeper one goes all the way into the dermis. The superficial laser affects the epidermis, the outer layer of the skin, and that actually peels off brown spots, improves texture. It makes the skin a lot smoother. The deeper wavelength treats acne scars and wrinkles. And these two together work very synergistically. So we use them together in most cases. What's it used for? Well, it's used most commonly for sun damage. So brown spots, wrinkling, just general aging. So helps freshen up the skin. It gives you a fresh coat of skin, more or less. And we find that when we treat something with fraxel, the brown spots will reduce substantially, but over time, they want to come back. So good skin care is necessary to sort of maintain it. If you don't do fraxel, your skin get worse over the years. If you don't do fraxel and use skincare, you'll slow it down. But if you do fraxel, you actually reverse time and you can maintain it to some degree with topicals. Typically, people do one fraxel treatment, and they do skin care, and they might do it every year and a half or so to sort of maintain what they have. The fraxel costs, generally speaking, 1150 for the face. For the strongest frax, we call it the fraxel advanced. And adding in the neck is $300, and the decollete or the upper chest is $300. The least expensive fraxel is for spot treatment of acne scarring, and that's about $500. So $500 for acne scarring, and then it's just the one wavelength, 1150 for the face. For general photo damage, the procedure requires a numbing cream to put on the skin. Because it does, it is uncomfortable. Sometimes we even numb, do what's called nerve blocks to the face. Takes about, you'll be here about two or three hours because the procedure takes about 30 minutes. But we have to numb you up, get pictures, get consent, get you prepared and everything. Then there's some cleanup afterwards. So for the acne laser, the downtime is not that bad. It's about three days of redness. For these photo damage, one with the two wavelengths, there's peeling about day three to day five and then almost up to about a week. There's some, some degree of peeling. Redness is about three to five days. You can go out in public. It's not an open wound, but it'll look like at first like you had a real significant tan. And then it starts peeling. So you have some uneven skin. And we have you put topicals on afterwards to kind of speed that up. We frequently use platelet rich plasma, which we draw your blood and get the platelets out to put on the skin after the fraxel. It makes you heal faster, gives you better results, and makes you feel more comfortable. That's a fraxel. It's a workhorse for resurfacing of the skin and making your skin brighter. Works better than any kind of IPL microdermabrasion chemical peel. The very safe, very predictable and one of the most common procedures. So thank you.