A clean, fresh-face look is in, especially during these humid days when nobody has time to sweat off a face full of foundation. That means getting your skin regimen locked down is key, and it can be difficult to know which products and procedures are best for your skin just by looking at the surface. A deeper look at your face can tell you which areas to treat—pores, wrinkles or brown spots—and how to treat them.
Ashlee Campbell, a medical aesthetician at Plaza Aesthetics and Wellness, is used to looking at faces and coming up with targeted skincare plans and treatment options. But lately, she’s been using a relatively new machine called the Visia Skin Analysis System to help her provide a more accurate and thorough consultation.
It’s a quick process. After putting your face in the Visia, it rotates around your head to capture a series of images of your skin’s surface and subsurface. The images pinpoint textured areas, UV and brown spots, pores, wrinkles, porphyrins (bacteria excretions), blemishes and red areas. Then the system analyzes the images to indicate which parts of your skin need work. It also tracks your skincare progress over time.
“You know, it’s hard when you look at yourself every day to see the progress of using good skincare,” Campbell says. “This is a really good tool to help you see improvements deep within your skin.”
Campbell says that with the Visia machine, it’s easy to have direct, honest conversations with people about their skin. “It’s clinical,” she says. “It’s not just making up random things. Sure, it can be used as a selling tool, but it’s not a gimmick.”
While images from the Visia reveal what’s happening below the surface of the skin, they also mark problem areas that are visible to the eye. If you know you have texture on your cheeks, for instance, the images will highlight those areas while also coming up with a treatment plan and product recommendations for improving your skin’s texture.
The machine has a few fun features, too, like the advanced aging simulation, which gives you an idea of what your face might look like from your current age to eighty years old. There’s also the injectables simulation feature, which generates a picture of what your face would look like after receiving Botox, filler and other injections.
After reading your face, the Visia system analyzes the images and gives you the age of your skin. So while you might only be thirty-two years old, your face age could be forty-five. Of course, age is just a number—but in this case, the number might tell you that all those years of forgetting to apply sunscreen are catching up with you. And it’s better to know the truth, right?
