Better Yet, What Not To Do!

Immediately you may feel the need to press or squeeze the pimple to it’s puss filled death… DON’T. That’s not only a sure fire way of making your skin sore, but you’ll probably spread the problem due to you unwittingly contaminating other healthier parts of your skin. So rule number one, stay cool, it’s not the end of the world (even if it initially feels like it). Rule number two, allow the skin to heal on its own, which you can be sure it’ll do, eventually.

No I Can’t Wait

Ok if the issue is urgent and you really don’t have the time to wait for natural healing then as always in matters of the skin, professional dermatologists are the ones to listen to. If you head out to visit one most likely they’ll treat the problem with Cortisone, applying an injection to the damaged skin and preventing it from getting any larger, and/or nastier.

What About Acne ?

Ok so there’s not one pimple but multiple, what then ? Well it’s possible you’re dealing with Acne, which in simple terms is a when breakouts of pimple inflammation take place much too often. Conditions such as Keratosis Pilatis and Bacterial Folliculitis are all versions of it, but dermatologists explain that not all acne is the same, and there are basically three types, “whiteheads”, “blackheads” and “red bumps”. Each type may receive a particular treatment but in many cases Cryotherapy maybe prescribed (a soft variety Corticoid).

The Varieties Explained

Let’s take a look at the various types below.

Whiteheads - Also referred to as “closed comedones”, are those follicles which appear as having microscopic openings to the surface of the skin. You recognize them for their white color, which is a result of the air not reaching the follicle, thus preventing oxidation.

Blackheads - Also known as “open comedones”, the typical black spots usually appearing in the nose skin, if you look closely in the mirror you may be surprised for they’re very common. Their color is a result of the opposite condition from “closed comedones”, since in the case of “blackheads” they have a wider opening to the skin’s surface, allowing for the air to reach the follicle, which causes a chemical response resulting in melanin oxidation.

Red Bumps - Not much to say about these except that they’re big, red and filled with puss. You don’t want to mess with these guys which for the most part are rarely found alongside blackheads and whiteheads.

The treatments for both whiteheads and blackheads may take some time before you start seeing the results, since there isn’t any “instantaneous” cure for acne at the moment, despite what some skin products vendors may say.

Pop Goes The World

Ok, so you read this article and every now and then look at the mirror to see the pimple that brought you to the website in the first place. And you’ve decided you’re going to pop it anyway. Although you’re advised, again and again not to pop, if you’re going to do so, then let’s take a look at some basic A, B, C rules for safe pimple popping.

A: TAKE A SHOWER - It makes the skin sinuous and prepares it better for the procedure.
B: NEEDLE - Make sure to use a germ-free needle; take your needle and sterilize it with alcohol.
C: TISSUES - To wrap your index fingers with.

Start by pressing on the sides without forcefully trying to take it out. Remember: only pop out pimples which are ready to go, never try to force out a pimple which is not “mature” enough. You recognize it by its white color on the skin’s surface.

Prevention Is In Your Hands

We’ve heard it countless times, prevention is always better than cure and pimples are no different. There are various measures you can take to keep your skin pimple free thus reducing the risk of acne related tribulations to a minimum.

Most important of all and always helpful (even when a metabolic pathology’s involved) is to educate yourself into maintaining a good personal hygiene. Avoiding the excess of grease, experts say, is the secret to preventing acne; washing your face using natural soap (neutral if possible) and clean dry facial towels: “The best one can do to stay away from acne is to never allowing for excessive amounts of grease in the skin, especially facial skin”.

Sleep Well

Yet another secret may come in your sleep, actually, for as experts yell out: “Sleeping well is one of the corner stones of skin care. It is while you sleep that tissues get to work on regenerating themselves”. And for that, keep in mind that the human body naturally rests better during night-time.

Finally, may you get informed those aiding products such as facial clay mascaras and the like are supposed to be a complement, not a therapy. Maintaining your personal hygiene on a periodical basis should be your number one skin care priority. Then you can safely recur to the beauty shop and get your cosmetics. They will shine their best on you because you will be shining healthy already.

Without knowing, you maybe contributing to a continued mistreatment of your skin in a whole range of ways from smoking, spending to much time tanning, or even going to the sack without correctly removing your mascara and makeup. This list goes on!

General Negligence

However, lack of knowledge about our skin isn’t the number 1 problem. Often it’s down to a simple case of negligence and miscare. In fact having spoken to many ladies there seems to be two types of women that exist. First come those that simply never even look at the mirror nor mind your skin at all and the second which I deem to be the worst are those that run to the beauty center begging for some heavenly miraculous solution to resolve any blemish or breakout on the skin.

The Wonder Treatments

A lot of people feel content with going to beauty spas, receiving various magical unguent based beauty healings, facial massages, solarium sessions and what not. But it’s surprising how many beauty centers do not count professional dermatologists amongst their staff, and even though the aforementioned treatments may well give the impression of being an ideal approach to preserving a healthy skin.The fact remains that even these beauty centers will fail in their alleged mission unless there is a dedicated skin care professional who can give you the kind of counsel you need and deserve.

Others way of falling prey include those spas and beauty salons that constantly try to sell you the latest product from the ever growing industry of beauty. Miami Cosmetic Centre director Leslie Baumann can assist us for the purpose of this article by providing some information on a couple of the most consulted issues, and how to deal with them properly.

Talking To The Expert

According to Bauman, wrinkles are undoubtedly the number one consulting matter, and it is no surprise, as wrinkles are of course regarded as a sign of aging. The scoop is as follows: a human ages because of the accumulation of “free radical” based damage which the body endures over the years of ones life.

The Free Radicals

A “free radical” being an open shell atom/molecule with single unpaired electrons. Even though it may sound a bit technical, the subject matter concerning wrinkles is all to do with a particular “free radical” called Melanin. This is the substance is responsible for skin, hair and eye color. In the particular case of Melanin, Bauman explains, it’s a non chemically reactive “free radical”, therefore the habitual use of antioxidants in most (if not all) anti-age treatments: antioxidants seem to engage “free radicals” with an appeasement force.

Don’t Inject, Swallow

According to Baumann, a plain high-spectrum sun block emulsion may put together an efficient wrinkle treatment, because “it may prevent free radicals from tearing down collagen and harming the DNA”. Bauman and her squad accept that true antioxidants are better received by humans when they are swallowed, rather than injected.

“Free radicals” theory, however is exactly that, it’s in the realm of the theoretical, and it calls for further study, which is being conducted, and most dermatologists usually rely on Botox and wrinkle stuffing unguents when dealing with severe cases of deep wrinkles.

Varicose Veins

Varicose veins are another popular matter of consultation, Bauman says, and it may be a problem concerning grown up women as well as young maidens: little reddish “tangle webs” of veins (earning this affliction the nickname “spider veins”), mainly in the legs and arms.

This is more often than not a hereditary malady, related to blood circulation problems, and the best way to deal with it is to ask for the counsel of the general practitioner of your trust, so that he/she may scrutinize and revise the particularities of your case and refer you to a specialist physician that will help.

There is a treatment usually referred as “Sclerotherapy”, which is a very popular way to deal with varicose veins, both shallow and deep. Its financial fee may vary depending on the severity of the problem and the zone of the body to be treated but it usually ranges from $100-$500. It’s recommended to make arrangements for a consultation with a general practitioner, before attending one of these sessions; keep in mind that even after a successful procedure, the use of specifically designed leg rubber bands will be prescribed for the post operatory term, and that the whole process has to be repeated after a few years from the original treatment.

Tearing Down The Myths

We hope the above article and the input from our beauty expert helped you tear down some of the myths and truths about healthy skin. Now go out there and take care of your skin.

Thankfully you don’t have to hide from it any more. You can reduce the appearance of those pesky dimples and I’ve got 3 things you can get started with today to do so.

• Get a good Topical Treatment Cream: There’s lots of buzz around topical anti cellulite creams. Some people say they work, others say they’re scams. Let me put my word in by saying that the products do work, how ever you can’t expect a miracle over night and you have to choose the right product.

  Look for cellulite creams that contain caffeine and other stimulant ingredients. This gets the blood flowing to the area and helps pull toxins away and open metabolic pathways in the body.

• Exercise: There’s lots of talk about exercise not being able to reduce cellulite and on it’s own it can’t do everything. How ever exercising the key areas where you have cellulite on your body will reduce the visibility of dimples.

  Combine exercise with a great topical cream treatment like we talked about above and you’re ahead of the game

• Drink Water: This seems like a no brainier when we’re talking about weight loss but it can be the same for cellulite. You need to drink lots of water to flush out your system. IT’s important that you don’t hold any water weight and you need be hydrated for both exercise and getting rid of toxins.

  Again water on it’s own isn’t just going to pull cellulite out of your body but these three steps combined will help you feel better not just about your cellulite but about your over all health to.

]]> http://www.vanitycashstar.com/3-ways-to-get-rid-of-pesky-cellulite-dimples/feed/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/removing-stretch-marks/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/removing-stretch-marks/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 14:18:11 +0000 Rachel Mathews http://www.vanitycashstar.com/?p=193 Most if not all people have at some point had to deal with the presence of stretch marks on their body. Around the belly, on the back, on the legs, wherever they appear they can often turn an unotherwise beautiful piece of skin into something quite hideous. The causes are of course numerous but in most cases it’s due to either a rapid gain or loss of body weight e.g. pregnancy, weight lifting, crash dieting.

This article looks at the various solutions and products available on the market that can help eliminate and or reduce the visibility of those marks, so lets get straight into it.

The Common Problem

Stretch marks can appear anywhere on the body but simply put some places on the body seem to feature them more than others. Examples include the buttocks, abdomen, upper arms, underarms, inner and outer thighs, hips, and of course the breast area. I just want to stress at this point that although stretch marks pose no health risks and/or harm to your body they are unsightly and this alone is an acceptable reason for us to look for a solution.

The Creams & Oils

The majority of the early products included things like olive oils and creams which tended to focus more on fading the stretch marks rather than eliminating them, and to top it all off in many cases they did little more than reduce the redness and color around the stretch marks.

Other products which were heard of throughout most of the 80s and 90s included the classic Cocoa butter creams which claimed to be an effective moisturizer in preventing stretch marks from forming in the first place. Once again no research studies have shown that these methods prevent stretch marks or improve their appearance once a stretch mark has already formed. Creams sound like a quick and dirty way of ridding yourself of stretchmarks but in most cases they’ll either work perfectly or won’t work at all. We’ve reviewed some creams that do work at the end of this article.

Laser Treatments

Moving on from the creams there are many laser and micro dermabrasion treatments available that actually do work and help improve the appearance of existing stretch marks. Used daily for one month, there can be monumental improvements in the appearance of a stretch marks length, depth, and overall surface area.

The great thing about laser stretch mark removal is that it’s a 100% non invasive in office procedure that needs no recovery time at all. It works by sealing blood vessels that cause stretch marks to appear red, which will in turn minimize the appearance so much that they will either look invisible or simply disappear.

The laser in many cases can also activate collagen growth, which will attempt to close the scar that was created by the stretch mark in the first place. The only downside to this method is that in certain cases the body may suffer from some superficial tissue damage, certain stretch marks simply may not respond to the laser therapy, and you may develop blisters and other reactions to the treatment.

Fractional laser resurfacing is a variation of the conventional laser therapy techniques and uses scattered pulses of light to treat stretch marks. Only a small fraction of the scar is zapped by the laser over the course of several treatments which causes microscopic wounds on the scar allowing the body to respond with new collagen and epithelium.

In a 2007 a clinical trial was carried out on this cosmetic procedure where 5 out of 6 treatments resulted in the sufferers stretch marks improving by as much as 75 percent. Now that’s odds we like the sound of.

Cosmetic Surgery

The tummy tuck (and we’re going into cosmetic surgery here) is a slightly more extreme and albeit costly method which many celebrities follow up with after giving birth. By removing the skin from around the stomach area a successful tummy tuck will remove the bulge and the stretch marks that were developed during the pregnancy. This however is an extreme method and obviously only applies to stretch marks on the abdominal area. If you’ve got marks around your thighs, buttocks or back, you’re going to have to look for an alternative, so not really a great method in our books.

Creams For Prevention

We’ve already covered creams and confirmed that most either have extremely low success rates or simply don’t work at all. However despite all these problems there are creams that will help you prevent further stretch marks and in some cases even reduce the coloration of existing ones.

These creams don’t promise the permanent removal associated with laser but can and will prevent new marks from developing. As long as you’re realistic about what a cream can achieve, there’s no reason why selectively using creams won’t help you achieve your goals.

Our personal recommendation is a product from Revitol which we’ve found to work extremely well as a prevention cream, which in some cases also helps to dull down the coloration of existing marks. Head over to their site and you’ll find a no hype, straight forward site with a nice 90 day return policy. It’s worked great for the majority of women who’ve purchased so before you give laser a try, give the guys at Revitol a shot.



]]> http://www.vanitycashstar.com/removing-stretch-marks/feed/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/are-wrinkles-a-problem/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/are-wrinkles-a-problem/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 12:45:25 +0000 Rachel Mathews http://www.vanitycashstar.com/?p=183 Get a face lift without having a face lift! Here are 10 skin care tips that you can follow without having to go under the knife.
• Knowing your skin type is one of the most important skin care tip. This is important because not every skin care product suits everyone. In fact, all the skin care products specify the type of skin they cater too.
• ‘Drink a lot of water’. This will not keep your skin moist but will help in overall upkeep of your health (and in turn your skin). It might seem a bit awkward to some, however, this is an important skin care tip.
• Only use the best anti wrinkle treatment creams that contain proven ingredients through clinical testing. Try if possible also to purchase products that come with a money back guarantee rather then you having to take all the risk that the product is going to work.
• Cleanse your skin regularly (1-2 times everyday). A very effective skin care tip that helps in getting rid of the dirt and other harsh elements from your skin. Cleansing is especially important when you have been out of your house (and hence exposed to pollutants, dust etc). This skin care tip also advocates the use of Luke warm water for cleansing (hot and cold water, both, cause damage to your skin)
• Be gentle, after all it’s your skin. Don’t scrub/exfoliate too hard or too often. Similarly, don’t apply too much or too many skin care products. A must-to-follow skin care tip.
• Keep your skin moist at all times. This is one of the most important skin care tip. Don’t let your skin get dry. Dryness causes the outer layer of your skin to break, leading to a rough and unattractive appearance. Use moisturizers/ emollients. Moisturizers work best when applied while the skin is still damp.
• Avoid the use of soap on your face. Soap should only be used from below the neck. A small but important skin care tip.
• Use sunscreen to protect yourself from sun’s harmful UV radiations. You can use day-time moisturizers that have sunscreen built into them. Use them even when it’s cloudy. UV radiations are known to cause skin cancer, so follow this skin care tip without fail.
• A bit of exercise and good sleep are essential too, not just for skin care but for your health as a whole. Lack of sleep can lead to formation of wrinkles below your eyes and lack of exercise can cause your skin to slack. Moreover, exercise and sleep also help in beating stress. So besides being a skin care tip, this is also a health care tip.
• Treat skin dilemmas with care. This skin care tip is about not ignoring any skin dilemmas. Consult your dermatologist before you go on to use a skin care product (lest you do end up harming your skin even more).
• Beat the stress. The harmful effects of stress are known to everyone, however, sometimes stating the obvious is essential too (and hence this skin care tip found its place here). Yes, stress harms skin too. So, take a break or indulge in a warm bubble bath or just get good sleep.

If the above tips still aren’t helping your skin it may simply be because of your age. Sagging and wrinkles are a common part of getting older so if you’re looking for that something extra to help smoothen away those wrinkles then take a look at some of the natural alternative medicines available below.



]]> http://www.vanitycashstar.com/are-wrinkles-a-problem/feed/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/breast-implant-dangers/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/breast-implant-dangers/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 12:28:15 +0000 Rachel Mathews http://www.vanitycashstar.com/?p=174 Did you know that 3% of people who get breast implants suffer from leakage within three years of having them done. The result a deflated implant and unequal sized breasts. It’s stats like these that can often make you wonder if breast implants are really worth their weight in gold. We’re going to take a look at some of the short comings of getting breast implants and possible problems you might have to deal with further down the line.

Leaking Implants

The implants used by most surgeons contain a saline fill which is basically just salt water. In the case of a leakage the water will be absorbed into the body without ill effects. Older implants however may contain a silicone gel which if leaks can do one of two things. If there is a breakage of the implant shell where a contracture scar has formed around it, then it may not feel like anything has happened.

However if the shell breaks and there is no contracture scar, then leakage into the surrounding tissue results, and the sensation that the implant is deflating will occur. The leaking gel may further collect in the breast and a new scar may form around it. In other cases gel can migrate through the lymphatic system to another area of the body.

Breaks like the above may require a second operation allowing the surgeon to replaceme the leaking implant. If the gel has migrated it may not be possible to remove all of the silicone gel. It’s this silicone gel that some say is related to the initiation of connective tissue disorders.

Other studies further enforce the problem of leaking implants showing that 63.6% of breast implants which had been in place for between one and 25 years had ruptured or were leaking. For more details on this stats click here

Leak Causes

For silicone gel and saline filled implants, some common causes of rupture or deflation include; damage by surgical instruments during surgery, overfilling or underfilling of the implant with saline solution (specific only to saline filled breast implants), capsular contracture, closed capsulotomy, stresses such as trauma or intense physical manipulation, excessive compression during mammographic imaging, placement through umbilical incision, site injury to the breast, normal aging of the implant, and lastly unknown and/or unexplained reasons.

To Implant Or Not To Implant

There’s plenty of people out there who haven’t had any problems with their implants and have continued to enjoy fuller, bigger breasts thanks to the procedures available. However breast implants require surgery and any form of surgery doesn’t come without it’s risks so do your research before you decide to get them done.

Top 4 Natural Breast Enhancing Products

For those of you that want fuller breasts but without the hassles of surgery then don’t forget to check out our article covering 4 of the top natural breast enlargement alternatives to surgery.

]]> http://www.vanitycashstar.com/breast-implant-dangers/feed/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/cosmetic-surgery-demand-increases/ http://www.vanitycashstar.com/cosmetic-surgery-demand-increases/#comments Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:40:05 +0000 Rachel Mathews http://vanitycashstar.com/?p=80 We all know cosmetic surgery is a hot commodity and right now due to price decreases and general levels of affordability increasing, more and more people are opting in for both minor and major plastic surgery procedures.

According to the ASAPS (The American Society of Plastic Surgery) In 2007 there were over 11 million cosmetic surgery procedures performed in the united states alone. 10 years earlier in 1997 the statistics were much lower and cosmetic surgery since then has increased by more than 400%.

The year is now 2009 and doctors are predicting a increase of more than 10% for this year alone.

The top 5 most popular cosmetic surgery procedures in 2007  were…

1. Liposuction.
2. Breast Augmentation.
3. Eye Lid Surgery.
4. Tummy Tuck Surgery.
5. Female Breast Reduction.

The top 5 most popular non cosmetic surgery procedures in 2007 were…

1. Botox
2. Hyaluronic Acid
3. Laser Hair Removal
4. Microdermabrasion
5. Laser skin resurfacing

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