How can you tell someone’s age? Is (a) their ability to come up with something more technological than sending an email and using a printer (guilty)? (b) if 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 a bit, but the answer is definitely not (c). As a 56-year-old woman, I find it impossible to tell the age of anyone between 25 and 40, so furrow-free are their foreheads, and as for 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 are.
Women have it all, and not necessarily in the way Helen Gurley Brown’s book of the same name intended us to in 1982. This was published just seven years before the arrival of the now famous injectable Botox, and what we actually have is, worldwide, about $3.5 billion worth of Botox this year alone. It’s not just Botox: More than 14.9 million surgical and 18.8 million non-surgical procedures—from so-called facelifts to full facelifts—were performed worldwide in 2022. A pleasant side effect of all this? Beauty brands are now teaming up with dermatologists, estheticians, and plastic surgeons in a mutual love fest that’s the beauty equivalent of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”—and the results might just be giving us our best skin yet.
Patricia Ogilvie—whose clinic, Skinconcept Munich, includes two private dermatology and laser medicine practices—believes so. Working with approximately 14 different laser systems, from ablative (which smoothes the skin by removing its top layers) to non-ablative (which generates heat and tightens collagen without irritating the skin), her laser specialty has been of interest to Diorwhich found that 50% of premium customers, including her own, undergo cosmetic procedures such as laser. For Dr. Ogilvie, dermatologist and member of Dior’s Anti-Aging Council, introducing Dior’s La Micro-Huile de Rose Activated Serum in these otherwise potentially aggressive treatments she was irresistible. “To some extent, all of these procedures rely on creating damage to the skin,” explains Dr. Ogilvie. “It’s an induced healing process, and we want to orchestrate that as much as possible while still getting the benefits of collagen production. It’s a balance.”
Botox and laser friendly products
Dr. Ogilvie is excited about how this can benefit her own patients: “My clients find it very difficult in social situations to [publicly] they show signs of post-treatment redness,” he says, “so even reducing downtime by a few degrees is great for them.”
Dior isn’t the only skincare brand on the laser path. Shiseido’s new Bio-Performance Skin HiForce Cream was designed around how laser treatments push our skin into crisis mode, prompting it to focus on maximum recovery and regeneration. And it was tested by a dermatologist who specializes in non-ablative fractional laser therapy, who found it helped the skin heal faster afterwards.
Meantime, Orveda’s new Youth Glove Protocol Hand Care Trio was inspired by aesthetic hand rejuvenation procedures, such as fillers. Our hands often bear the brunt of aging and receive a sloppy hand cream if they’re lucky, but Orveda’s new daily cream and premium weekly treatment are applied at home with medical-grade silicone gloves so the complex can plump up the dorsum of the hands. It promises to increase thickness by 23%.
