In this era of amazing tech and advanced treatments, you don’t have to bare old injuries. Here’s how to bring back the smooth.
Time may heal all wounds, but it’s not so good at erasing them. Scars occur when an injury slices through the top layer of skin and penetrates the dermis, says Neal Schultz, M.D., a dermatologist in New York City. What happens next depends on your body’s collagen response. If it generates just the right amount of this skin-repairing protein, you’ll be left with a flat, faint scar. If your body can’t drum up enough collagen, you’ll wind up with a sunken scar. And if your body churns out too much, you’re stuck with a raised scar. That’s not to say you’ll develop the same type of scar every time you’re injured, “but people tend to be predisposed to scarring a certain way,” says Diane Madfes, M.D., an assistant professor in the department of dermatology at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. In other words, if you have one raised scar, you’re more likely to have another in the future. Injury location factors in as well— scars on the chest tend to be especially obvious because the skin there is so thin, and skin trauma below the waist can scar badly because cell turnover is slower and there is less blood flow to the lower body. Fortunately, no matter what kind of scar you have, there are new and effective ways to prevent being left with a permanent mark. Turn the page for your options.
If your scars look...
Sunken
These are atrophic scars. They occur when you lose skin tissue and your body can’t regenerate it, so you’re left with a depression. They often stem from a bad case of acne or chicken pox— or having an abnormal mole removed.
ERASE THEM
This story is from the October 2017 edition of Shape Malaysia.
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This story is from the October 2017 edition of Shape Malaysia.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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