Permanent makeup, aka Tattoo Makeup, is best known for cosmetic procedures, such as permanent eyebrows, permanent eyeliner and permanent lip color. Less known are paramedical permanent makeup procedures, such as areola re-pigmentation and scar camouflage, where permanent makeup is used to restore color to the scar tissue, matching and blending it into surrounding skin. Yet, there is still another application of permanent makeup, which results in permanent reduction or disappearance of scars and stretch marks. This technique, known as skin needling or scar fading, was developed by plastic surgeons in the early 1990s as a safer alternative to laser treatments.
Skin needling uses permanent makeup device to create thousands of tiny holes, 1mm – 3 mm deep into the scar tissue. Trauma, induced by those holes, stimulates the body to produce new collagen and elastin, replacing the scar tissue with a new skin. Broken up in this process scar tissue sheds, smoothing and leveling hypertrophic (raised) and hypotrophic (depressed) scar. The procedure works best on mature, non-kelloidal scars. Skin needling’s effectiveness for scar reduction has been confirmed by numerous clinical studies and the results published in many prestigious medical journals, such as Clinical and Experimental Dermatology (2008) and Journal of Plastic Reconstructive Surgery (2009). The photographs below, courtesy of www.ChicagoPermanentCosmetics.com, a leading permanent makeup facility in Chicago, show quite dramatic effects after only one or several treatments.
The concept of causing thousands of minute injuries to the dermis, thereby stimulating the production of new skin to replace damaged tissue, is not new.> It has been used successfully for scar treatment by Fraxel laser. However, as with all laser treatments, the bulk of the Fraxel laser energy is deposited at the surface of the skin and only a small fraction of that energy actually penetrates into and is absorbed by the targeted tissue. The depth of the penetration is dependent on the individual skin properties, which may vary greatly, depending on the age and ethnicity. As a result, the stimulation may extend too far or not far enough into the skin. This creates the risk of new scarring at the skin surface and limits the amount of stimulation that the lasers can safely deliver to the dermis.
What may make skin needling both safer and more effective is its more precise, targeted delivery of stimulation. Exactly the same level of injury is caused at the skin surface as at the dermis level. Unlike lasers, the depth to which the stimulation is delivered is independent of the skin properties, age or ethnicity and is controlled precisely by the needle length. “Unlike with ablative lasers, there’s no risk of scarring,” says Matthias Aust, MD, a plastic surgeon in Hannover, Germany. “And in addition to stimulating fibroblasts to make collagen and elastin, needling also releases growth factors, which non-ablative lasers don’t do.” As a result, skin needling may allow greater regenerative skin stimulation, with much shorter recovery time and lower risk of procedure-induced scarring, than the laser treatments. It has been reported that the CIT has an additional benefit: absorption of creams and medications placed on the skin surface prior to the procedure is greatly enhanced by the tiny punctures caused by the procedure, thereby greatly increasing their effectiveness. That allows combining skin needling with anti-scarring medications, such as Strivectin, for an enhanced effect.
Because skin needling requires much cheaper equipment than the Fraxel laser, the cost of skin needling procedure is much lower. A typical skin needling procedure costs about $300 per single treatment. A typical Fraxel laser procedure is $750 – $1500 per single treatment (Source: www.Fraxel.com). As a downside, the low cost of skin needling equipment has not attracted any major manufacturers willing to promote this excellent procedure to the doctors and public, leaving it largely unknown.