Is photofacial the answer? What was the question?

It was more than a bad hair day. It was a need-a-haircut, oh my gawd my roots are showing, PMS bloaty, I look like $#%! kind of day. Couldn’t get an appointment with my haircutter, so I decided that my real problem was that my skin looked ashy and that was because I had run out of my favorite skin wash (this glycolic acid exfoliator thing), so I went to Skin Spirit in Palo Alto to buy some.

And got to talking about something a little stronger, like a photofacial, a.k.a. Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) Therapy.

Yeah, I know I’m the last one on the block, again, to get one. And I know this is one more step down the slippery slope of Bo-Ho-dom. But even the Wall Street Journal says it’s the greatest thing since the Internet (or Starbucks, or sliced bread, you pick the metaphor). It’s supposed to remove red blotches (got those) and brown aging spots (definitely have those) and freckles (got a few), and make your whole skin just look better. Doesn’t work on wrinkles, pity. But it was sounding good to me.

And I figured I was due to catch up with some deferred maintenance. I used to get facials several times a year, at $60-$80 a pop (you can tell by the price that it was a while ago.) I stopped when I had kids—who

had time? So that’s, say $240 a year I didn’t spend for more than a decade, and IPL is $400…anyway, the math seemed to work. (According to the Wall Street Journal, you need one to six treatments, and the results can last up to five years.)

The article said patients usually get a topical anesthetic; the Skin Spirit person said that wasn’t necessary, it really didn’t hurt that much. (What do you call these people? Technician is the guy that fixes my computer. Esthetician is the Russian woman who used to attack my pores with such gusto. They’re not dermatologists, they’re not masseuses. Someone help me out here.)

We began. She covered my eyes, and then started zapping my skin, working methodically around the edges and towards the center. Even through the eye cover, with eyes closed, I could see a bright light, and feel a spark hitting my skin, kind of like when you get too close to a sparkler on the Fourth of July. There was a flash of heat, but the sting was gone before it really registered.

“Uh, do I smell hair burning?” I asked.

“Hair? I don’t think so,” she replied. “Oh, maybe it’s that little peach fuzz you’ve got around the edge of your face.”

Hmmm. That made me a little nervous, but as she worked in towards my nose the smell went away and I stopped worrying about it. (I found out later that IPL is also used for hair removal.)

I’m not sure how long the whole thing took—20 minutes, maybe?

The results? My nose is less red, and I tend to have a reddish nose, even when it’s not cold out and I haven’t had a glass of wine. That I expected, and, she told me, if I repeated the treatment, the redness would fade a lot more. The brown blotches of sun damage on the left edge of my face, the one that gets the sun shining in my car window, are noticeably fainter.

The biggest surprise—a little red mark, the leftover of a nasty PMS zit that got infected that I’ve been spackling with cover-up for years, shrunk noticeably. If another treatment or two could erase that, that alone would be the price of admission.

So I guess I agree with the Wall Street Journal’s assessment, IPL is “a reliable way to improve skin’s appearance.”

And it’s made me less depressed about the brown sun damage on my neck and chest (too many beach days reclining in a sand chair, and trips to the tropics packing tanning oil back when the goal was not to block the sun, but to get as brown as possible in as short a time as possible). I now know that I can get rid of this nasty stuff. I don’t feel like I urgently have to do it tomorrow, but I’ll get to it, maybe sooner, maybe later; certainly before my a high school reunion, so I can wear a seriously low-cut dress.