How can you tell someone’s age? Is it A, their ability to navigate anything more technical than sending an email and using a printer (guilty); B, whether or not they can recite all the lyrics to a Central Cee/Taylor Swift/Kool & the Gang song; or C, how wrinkled are their faces?
Not that it matters one bit, but the answer is definitely not ‘C’. As a 56-year-old woman, I find it impossible to determine the age of anyone between 25 and 40, so furrow-free is their forehead, and when it comes to the over-40s, from Sienna Miller to Demi Moore to Naomi Campbell, I’m fascinated by how healthy, beautiful and vibrant women of all ages look today before they think, “I want what she gets.”
Women have it all, and not necessarily in the way Helen Gurley Brown’s book of the same name intended us to. Published just seven years before the advent of the now famous injectable Botox, we have approximately $3.5 billion worth of Botox worldwide this year alone. It’s not just about Botox either: more than 14.9 million surgical and 18.8 million non-surgical procedures – from “adjustments” to full facelifts – were performed worldwide in 2022. A happy side effect of all this? Beauty brands are now teaming up with dermatologists, aesthetic doctors and plastic surgeons in a mutual love-fest of the beauty equivalent of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” the results of which might just give us the best. skin ever.
Dr. Patricia Ogilvie, whose clinic Skinconcept Munich includes two private clinics for dermatology and laser medicine, thinks so. Working with approximately 14 different laser systems, from ablative (which evens out the skin by removing the top layers) to non-ablative (which creates heat and tightens collagen without irritating the epidermis), her laser specialty was of interest to Dior which found that 50% of premium customers, including its own, were undergoing aesthetic procedures such as laser, and wanted to find ways to further support their skin. For Ogilvie, a dermatologist and member of Dior’s Reverse Aging Board, who introduces the new Dior La Micro-Huile de Rose activated serum to these otherwise potentially aggressive treatments is irresistible. A serum rich in omegas, made from the naturally hardy Rose de Granville and a patented biopeptide complex designed to stimulate collagen. It has the potential to double skin recovery in three days. “To some extent, all of these procedures rely on causing damage to the skin,” she explains. “It’s an induced healing process and we want to orchestrate that as much as possible while reaping the benefits of collagen production. It’s a balance.”
Ogilvie was impressed by Dior’s solid clinical data supporting the findings. Dior conducted tests on 69 laser patients in China before treatment and for up to three months afterward, and found that using the serum in addition to laser not only speeded recovery, but also maximized results. Ogilvie is enthusiastic about the benefits this could have for her own patients: “My clients find it very difficult to do that in social situations [publicly] show signs of redness after treatment,” she says, “and so reducing the recovery time by a few degrees is a very good thing for them.”
Dior isn’t the only skincare brand getting on the laser track. Shiseido’s new Bio-Performance Skin HIForce Cream is not only inspired by the way laser treatments put our skin into crisis mode, causing it to focus on maximum repair and regeneration, but has also been tested by a dermatologist who specializes in non-ablative fractional laser. where it was discovered that it helps the skin heal faster afterwards.