How can you tell someone’s age? Is it A, their ability to find their way around anything more tech-y 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 wrinkly their faces are?
Not that it matters one bit, but the answer is definitely not “C.” As a 56-year-old woman, I find it impossible to tell anyone’s age between about 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 am fascinated at just how healthy, beautiful and vibrant women of all ages are looking these days, before thinking, “I want what she’s having.”
Women are having it all, and not necessarily in the way that Helen Gurley Brown’s book of the same name intended us to. Published a mere seven years before the arrival of the now-famous injectable Botox, what we’re actually having is, globally, about $3.5 billion worth of Botox this year alone. It’s not just Botox either: more than 14.9 million surgical and 18.8 million non-surgical procedures—everything from “tweakments” through to full-on facelifts—were performed worldwide in 2022. One 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 be giving us our best skin ever.
Dr Patricia Ogilvie, whose clinic Skinconcept Munich includes two private clinics in dermatology and laser medicine, thinks so. Working with around 14 different laser systems, from ablative (which evens out the skin by removing its top layers) to non-ablative (which creates heat and tightens the collagen without irritating the epidermis), her laser speciality was of interest to Dior, which, finding that 50% of premium customers, including its own, undergo aesthetic procedures such as laser, wanted to find ways to further support their skin. For Ogilvie, a dermatologist and member of Dior’s Reverse Aging Board, introducing Dior’s new 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 bio-peptide complex designed to boost collagen, it has the potential to double skin recovery in three days. “At a certain degree, all these procedures rely on creating damage to the skin,” she explains. “It’s an induced healing process and we want to orchestrate that as much as possible while also getting the benefits of collagen production. It’s a balance.”
Ogilvie was impressed by Dior’s solid clinical data used to back up its findings. Dior carried out tests on 69 laser patients in China before treatment and up to three months afterwards, and found that by using the serum alongside laser, recovery was not only speeded up but the results were maximized. Ogilvie is excited at how this might benefit her own patients: “My clients find it very difficult in social situations to [publicly] show any signs of redness post-treatment,” she says, “and so even just reducing the downtime by a few degrees is great for them.”
Dior isn’t the only skincare brand to be on the laser trail. Shiseido’s new Bio-Performance Skin HIForce Cream was not only inspired by the way laser treatments propel our skin into crisis mode, prompting it to focus on maximum recovery and regeneration, but it was also tested by a dermatologist specializing in non-ablative fractional laser, where it was found that it helps skin heal faster afterward.