By Warren B. Seiler III MD
I love IPL and so do my patients! IPL stands for Intense Pulsed Light, commonly known as “IPL Photofacial” or “IPL Photorejuvenation”. IPL is great for treating “reds and browns” on the skin. It treats sun damage, brown spots, melasma, hyperpigmentation, acne, rosacea, spider veins and broken capillaries. In addition to treating these individual spots and colors, I have found that IPL really helps patients to achieve overall better looking skin.
Patient Results
Yesterday I saw a patient as a follow-up to an IPL treatment. She has been a great patient of mine for some years now and has had Fraxel, Botox, and Juvederm and she uses SkinMedica skincare. She was about two weeks post her IPL treatment and she was really amazed at how much better her skin looked. She said that it not only removed her sun damage but also really made her skin “glow”. I told her that I have seen a lot of improvement in patients’ skin, in addition to helping with discoloration, in just helping with “photorejuvenation” and making the skin look better. She said she was glad she did it, that it didn’t have any discomfort or downtime after, and that she looked forward to using it as a procedure for maintenance to keep her skin looking great.
Easy Treatment with Long-Term Benefits
The immediate result comes with the decrease in discoloration, but the long term (“maintenance”) result in getting IPL regularly is that it really helps to keep the skin looking younger and healthy, help promote collagen growth, prevent effects of sun damage, and give the skin that healthy glow. Patients notice that their skin looks so much better after IPL even if they didn’t have a lot of discoloration to begin with. A well-known and respected cosmetic doctor I know published an article about a patient he had treated 22 times over about 8 years and she looked incredible, like she had had multiple major laser facial resurfacings with a CO2 laser. That just shows the cumulative benefit of getting regular IPLs.
