I’ve had red skin all my life. While it’s not severe, it’s definitely been irritating. Over the years, I’ve learnt the don’ts of rosacea, such as “don’t eat spicy food”, “don’t go under the sun”, “don’t exfoliate at all”. To be honest, I’d love to live a carefree life and not be afraid of a flare-up or break-out all the time. And I’d love to have a normal skintone, so I can wear less makeup.
So rather than trying to purchase another green-tinted corrector, I decided to look for a better option. A treatment, or a facial that would treat the problem. Specifically, such facials are called photo facials, because rather than using lasers, light-based devices are used to brighten the skin and to address specific skin concerns, without any downtime. And contrary to chemical peels and microdermabrasion, BBL penetrates deeper into skin to target a variety of skin problems, such as melasma, freckles, age spots, wrinkles and even redness and inflammation such as rosacea and acne.
WHY THE BBL WORKS
Not to be confused with Intense Pulsed Light (IPL), BBL is the newer, safer and therefore better version of light-based skin rejuvenation. In fact, the Sciton Forever Young BBL system has features which make the treatment more comfortable but also safeguards against burns and issues such as hyperpigmentation. For starters, it has a large treatment contact cooling sapphire crystal which allows a larger area to be treated, and the repetition rate is faster, allowing for gentler settings over multiple passes instead of single, higher and more dangerous ones.
The BBL works for redness, as it comes with Smart filters, which tap into the wide spectrum of light to radically tone down redness, by targeting hemoglobin in blood vessels. This is what allows BBL to be so effective in the treatment of rosacea.
The treatment delivers quick pulses of light, and also evens out the skin tone. The pulses felt like mild rubberband snaps – I could accept it. The whole session lasted approximately 15 minutes. I could see the difference. My redness became less red – more pink. And by the fourth session, I noticed that I was wearing less makeup.
Will I ever be confident enough to not wear makeup if I keep going with this photofacial? The Full Bloom Program is a six-session package. I no longer look embarrassingly red by my fourth, but I still flush after a workout. Maybe I’m already there, and it’s just a reluctance to part with some colouring I had always relied on. So maybe by my sixth session, I might just be confident enough to be out and about without foundation.