Your skin is a multilayered barrier that prevents harmful threats from damaging your internal organs and tissue, allows you to touch and feel, and helps control your internal temperature. It consists of three main layers, but between those are important sublayers (as many as 10) that help retain moisture, allow skin to stretch, waterproof, and provide skin color (pigment).
Over time, the structure of your skin changes because of several issues that can lead to many different conditions, including the formation of wrinkles, which become common as you get older but happen to younger people more often than you think. We deal with two types of wrinkles, dynamic and static, and they often need to be treated uniquely to offer the best results for your skin.
Regardless of what kind of wrinkles you’re dealing with, if you live in the Lake Oswego, Oregon, area, the Lake Oswego Laser Aesthetics (Lola) team at Lake Oswego ENT can help you get younger, firmer-looking skin.
Now, let’s examine the different types of wrinkles, their common causes, and how each type is treated.
Wrinkles result from your skin becoming less elastic, which indicates the reduction of proteins like elastin and collagen, forming folds, creases, and lines. As mentioned above, these often form in one of two major types:
Our faces are highly expressive in relaying a wide range of emotions, and in doing so, there are specific muscles we use repeatedly. Furrowing your brow, sucking motions when using a straw, and even smiling can all lead to dynamic wrinkles over time. These include lip lines, laugh lines around the nose, mouth, and lips, forehead and worry lines on your forehead, and crow’s feet around your eyes.
The loss of elastin and collagen leads to sagging skin, where gravity takes hold of areas that lack firmness and can’t stay up on their own. This leads to jowls, turkey neck, and banding (skin bands forming around the neck), frequently developing from dynamic wrinkles.
Our bodies produce fewer proteins as we get older, so wrinkles do develop more over time, but there are several other factors that affect their formation, such as:
We often focus on the wrinkles in our face because what most people see when talking to us, but they develop everywhere on our bodies, commonly also seen in our hands, arms, neck, and legs.
Dynamic and static wrinkles present different treatment challenges, and the options will vary depending on your needs. Both can be improved by stimulating the production of elastin and collagen, which can be done with dermabrasion, laser resurfacing, and microneedling.
However, there are specialized methods for managing the muscle contractions that lead to dynamic wrinkles and the sagging associated with static wrinkles. Injectables are available to help with both types, such as Botox®, which relaxes the muscles that lead to wrinkles and smooths out the skin, and dermal fillers, which add volume to areas of sagging skin to offer firmness. We offer both and many other solutions to help with your skin needs.
We will all struggle with wrinkles at some point, but when it happens, there are ways to get the look you want, and we can help. Make an appointment with the Lola team at Lake Grove ENT today to see younger, firmer skin.
