Learn What Really Happens to Your Face and Skin as You Age

In this video, Dr. Bomer explains how our face ages. The main components for aging are the deterioration of our skin, the loss of bone in our whole face and skull, and the loss of subcutaneous fat which leads to sagging and shadowing.

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Aging:

Intrinsic Aging – Factors that were born with. These are programmed in our DNA. And also the decline of growth hormone which we are all exposed to as we age.

Extrinsic Aging – Factors that we are exposing ourselves to. The Sun is a big factor. You can see a great example of that in a picture of Dr. Bomer compared to her brother.

This picture shows Dr. Bomer and her brother, who has always been avid with sun sports and he never used any sunscreen. You can see that he has bad sun exposure problems and Dr. Bomer’s skin looks good because she has been taking care of it.

Another extrinsic aging factor is environmental pollution, smoking, fluorescent lights, cell phone lights, etc.

Our diet is also an extrinsic aging factor. The foods we eat can affect the inflammation in our body which affects the inflammation in the skin and can adversely affect our skin with respect to brown spots and acne which can lead to scarring.

As we age our skin is actually getting thinner and it’s losing its water content and it’s losing its elasticity. When you are younger the skin is thicker and as we get older it becomes much thinner and we lose collagen, elastin, and hyaluronic acid.

The collagen is really the bulk. The elastin is responsible for the elasticity and allows the skin to jump back to where it was. Hyaluronic Acid also helps to maintain the thickness of the skin. As our skins age, we also get melanin deposition or coalescence.

Melanin is a pigment-producing molecule, it is responsible for the color in our skin. As we are exposed to Sun the melanin gets disrupted and starts to coalesce into spots and we get the production of irregular coloration. As we age we also get dysregulation of the vasculature. That can be in response to inflammatory components and we start to get some reddish discoloration.

Younger Skin Vs. Older Skin

The younger skin is thicker compared to the older skin. The older skin has less collagen and elastin, less Hyaluronic Acid (less water content), and also some wrinkling which is due to the loss of elastin

How do we prevent and reverse the aging of our skin?

We need to really protect ourselves from the Sun. Use sunscreen every day. Even on cloudy days, you can get UV damage.

Eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Keep in mind that certain foods might trigger acne which leads to scarring and pigmentation.

Use medical-grade skin care products. These products have been scientifically proven to generate collagen, regenerate elastin and rebuild the hyaluronic acid in our skin. Some of these ingredients help to speed the skin cycle up, exfoliate our skin, and keep the pores clean. The over-the-counter products often don’t have the concentration of ingredients to provide transformation of the skin. They might give the skin good hydration and maybe a little bit of exfoliation but nowhere near the rejuvenating properties of the medical grade skin care.

Receive regular skin treatments. These include chemical peels, laser treatments, as well as micro needling. These treatments help to build collagen and elastin.

How do skin treatments help the skin?

They do a controlled injury of the skin and the skin reacts to it by boosting collagen, elastin and Hyaluronic Acid production. It’s important that the injury not be too great because if the injury is too deep or too severe your skin might end up with scarring or uneven texture. It is important to have these treatments in a very controlled environment, by trained professionals, experienced in the equipment and skin healing. Skin treatments should be repeated frequently in a safe and controlled manner.

Why do we get shadowing in the face as we age?

A big component is the loss of subcutaneous fat pads. As you can see in the image below, we have fat pads all through our face, around our eyes, all through our cheeks.

All of these fat pads are diminishing and changing position. This leads to the shadowing and the sagging that we experience as we age.

As we are our bones shrink and the entire skull is getting smaller.

• We have loss of bone in the orbital rim which gets bigger.
• The opening to the nose gets bigger which adds to the deepening into the nasolabial fold.
• The cheekbone recedes backward so we get a drop of the cheek.
• The bone where the teeth are connected diminishes as well.
• The mandible (the jawbone) gets smaller both in length on the side as well as the thickness from front to back.

All of the bone loss contributes to the sagging of the tissues that hang down.

In the diagram you can see how the eye socket is bigger and the nose holes are bigger and the cheekbones have changed angles and the jaw has become much smaller shorter and less wide.

How we used to treat facial aging and how we treat it now.

20 years ago the understanding of aging was that the face starts to sag because of how many years we’ve been exposed to the effects of gravity. It’s now understood that the reason that things fall down is that we’re losing the structure underneath the skin.

We’re losing the bone, the fat and the skin is thinning and everything’s falling down.

Historically the focus was on just lifting the skin, so surgeons lift it up with surgery but now because we understand that the bone is shrinking and the fat pads are shrinking so it makes a lot more sense to restore that volume.

Dr. Bomer has been working on her technique for years and recognizes that volume loss is really a big component to facial aging. She has evolved those techniques to restore volume in the entire face and achieve natural-looking results.

To combat facial aging it is important to understand facial anatomy, and that the technique is appropriate to what is occurring with each person’s aging. Volumizing is really the key to a more youthful face, as well as improving the texture and thickness of the skin with medical grade skin care and skin treatments.

To schedule your consultation with Dr. Bomer or Dr. Bouzoukis, please call 480-889-8880. Rejuvent is located in Scottsdale, Arizona.