Example Treatment

Today for Michelle we are going to do a broadband light or BBL treatment for her. BBL is one of our favourite treatments here in the practice. As far as skin rejuvenation treatments go, it’s actually relatively mild and gentle. Most people don’t have any downtime with it, but the results of it can be really quite dramatic in terms of the improvement in the skin quality, especially with repeated treatments over time. In Michelle’s case, her main concern is the pigmentation, especially in the forehead. But actually when we examine her skin, we can see that she also has some broken blood vessels around the nose and chin, causing a little bit of background redness. She also has a little bit of texture issue going on there and some pores. None of these are dramatic issues. Rather than doing anything a little more aggressive, we are going to treat it just with BBL on its own.

There was a study published that showed when you do this, you don’t only make the skin look and feel younger, you change the genetic expression of skin cells to make them behave in a more genetically youthful way. I realise that sounds like mind blowing sci-fi stuff, but it’s true. It came from Stanford University and is a really credible study. So the benefits of this treatment are genuinely more than skin deep. The thing I love about BBL is that it is so versatile and customisable. So today for Michelle, we are going to do a total of five different passes, all targeting slightly different things. We’re going to start by doing two base passes, trying to get as much light and energy into the skin as we can to begin the stimulation process. The base passes are where we really start that process happening, where we’re just packing as much energy and light into the skin as we can to get us going. Next, we’re going to change the filter. We’re going to change the amount of energy we’re putting in. We’re going to change the bandwidth of the pulses of light to make it more specific to pick up brown pigments. So this is where we’re going to get out all of those little brown age spots that are starting to occur.

This is the treatment pass that is targeted specifically for those. Next, we’re going to change the filter again. We’re going to change the energy and the pulse width. And the changes that we’re making this time are to allow us to target more specifically red things within the skin. So blood vessels, rosacea. We also have the flexibility of even changing the apertures. So when we have these little individual vessels, we can trace them out until we get rid of it completely. We’re then going to move on to finish with the pass that’s everyone’s favourite pass called the skin tight pass. And the skin tight does exactly what the name suggests.

The way that it does that is by delivering energy and heat deeper into the skin to get to a stage where we’re stimulating collagen production and contraction of collagen and elastin to give us more firmness in the skin. To do this, we need to keep moving the probe backwards and forwards over the skin until we really build up enough heat deeper down that gives us the contraction in the collagen fibres. Now this is never going to give you as much tightening as, for example, a more invasive procedure might do. But it’s a great way of creating a little bit of tightening and it’s especially useful if you have things like creepy texture, especially on the neck here and along the jawline.

Most of our patients who are having BBL treatments are going to come for an initial corrective course. And usually that looks like three treatments spaced one a month. It just depends on the quality and condition of your skin and what we’re trying to achieve. And then when we’ve got you through that initial correction and we’ve got your skin health to where we want it to be, we then move on to the next stage, which is maintenance. And what that normally looks like is coming in to see us a couple of times a year and doing a single maintenance session just to keep on top of the skin quality and to stop it from starting to slide back again. Any questions or suggestions for future content, please pop them in the comments section and don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel.

BBL treatment is designed to improve pigmentation issues rather than worsen them. In most cases, it helps reduce age spots, sun damage, and other pigmentation irregularities by targeting melanin in the skin. However, in very rare cases, individuals with certain skin types – particularly darker skin types – may experience darkening due to post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation. This risk is minimised by good patient selection, using appropriate laser settings and following our aftercare instructions. If we are concerned you may be at higher risk of developing hyperpigmentation, we may recommend some additional safety measures such as pre-treating your skin with hydroquinone.