Skin Resurfacing

At his facial plastic surgery practices in Alpharetta and Dunwoody, Dr. Robinson performs laser skin resurfacing designed to stimulate collagen production and reveal smoother, tighter skin.

Dr. Robinson: Skin resurfacing is basically taking skin and changing its texture to make it smoother and tighter. Historically it was done with deep peels back in the sixties, seventies and the eighties. And then we had a changeover to using lasers and using lasers to accomplish the same thing. Now we have a good blend, sometimes we use lasers to do that, sometimes we use deep peels to do that. They both produce essentially the same result, which is to make skin tighter and smoother. A very good example is lower eye lid surgery. In the past there were some tell tale signs people had eye lid surgery when their eye lid was sitting a little too low and you could see the white of their eye. And that was because we used to think to make the skin look tighter in the lower lid we’d make an incision and pull the skin too tight. Well all that did was pull the eye lid down. We’ve now come to understand that it’s really changing the texture of the skin not the quantity of the skin but the quality of it that gives the tightening. And resurfacing basically is wounding the skin and stimulating it to make new. When you make new skin it makes new collagen which is smoother and tighter. The ideal candidates are those people who I describe as like crepe paper that’s been wrinkled and you get the lower lids or the deep lines around the mouth okay? Those are the types of patients, even the lines and then get the creases of their cheek, resurfacing works very well for that. And in addition it will get rid of a lot of the accumulation of excess pigment. We start to get blotchy as we age, accumulation of too much sun over time, and so resurfacing helps that as well. It takes about an hour, hour and a half at the most to be done. You have down time of about a week. After a week you’re back out, but you are usually wearing some makeup to camouflage the redness. The redness fades over a series of months. It’s very rejuvenating. Patients are very happy with it because it does something that we can’t do any other way with surgery, injectibles [phonetic], BOTOX, any of that.