I’ve been reading up online about laser skin resurfacing. I’m a little confused, since I’ve read about CO2 lasers, Fraxel lasers, Dot lasers, etc. What might be the best laser skin resurfacing treatment for a 42-year-old woman with freckles and sun damage on the face, neck, and décolletage?

Traditional CO2 lasers treat the skin in its entirety. Therefore, there is a lot of heat generated to the skin, resulting in prolonged healing period and redness of the skin. In an effort to decrease the healing period and redness of the skin, fractionated CO2 technologies were developed. The fractionated CO2 lasers (such as the DOT and FraxelRepair) deliver treatment in a microscopic pattern so that some areas of skin are treated while leaving other areas untouched. This decreases the amount of heat delivered to the skin, thus minimizing the healing period and redness of the skin. These fractionated CO2 lasers can be tailored to your desires and downtime, meaning that we can “dial down” the system if your downtime needs to be short. In such a case, you would probably benefit from a series of treatments. However, if you can tolerate one week of social downtime and are of the appropriate skin type, we can increase the treatment parameters to give an effective single treatment. As always, skin care is essential in the skin resurfacing patient. We work very closely with you in the healing period and weeks/months to follow to ensure that you use quality skin care products that not only protect the skin following laser resurfacing, but also enhance those results.

Posted by Rami K. Batniji, M.D., F.A.C.S.