Elle Beauty Cheat Sheet
Elle Magazine, October 1, 2007
Combating wrinkles around the mouth and on the back of the upper arm.
When the teenage catwalkers at Proenza Schouler's fall 2007 presentation strode the runway modeling black cloches and cherry red lips, two things were clear: one, time to buy a hat. And two, even women under the drinking age have wrinkles (tiny, yes, but visible) around their mouths...NYC plastic surgeon Michelle Copeland, M.D., D.M.D., often uses a fine needle to place extremely diluted amounts of Botox into skin—not muscle—to relax fibers.
Arms Race
Bat-wing top? Maybe. Your own pair of bat wings? Definitely not. But the back of the upper arm can be one of the most frustrating areas to tone. "Loss of elasticity everywhere is part of the aging process—just like it is for your face," Copeland says. "Lifting weights won't tighten skin." What will: good old radio frequency waves. As noted in Lasers in Surgery and Medicine, after one session of Thermage (the company partly funded the study), 53 percent of subjects had an increase in firmness on their upper arms, while 57 percent recorded an improvement in laxity. As Copeland notes, however, "Most people don't just have sagging; they also have fat." If fat is the greater of the two problems, she advises liposuction and notes that heat from the controversial Smart Lipo, in which a laser fiber melts fat cells before a cannula sucks it out, can also stimulate some collagen formation.