Understanding Red Light Therapy For Wrinkles

By Elaine Guthrie


Anyone can buy a boatload of anti-aging beauty and skincare products to fill an entire vanity or medicine closet with lotions, liquids and creams. There's also no dearth of surgical procedures to make aging symptoms like wrinkles vanish for the moment. But red light therapy for wrinkles is a rather innovative technique that is increasingly popular these days.

Phototherapy or heliotherapy is an established and scientifically proven technique for treating a wide range of ailments and disorders. It can help patients suffering from skin-related disorders such as eczema and acne. It speeds up healing of open wounds, and is even known to be useful for slowing down cancer. Not to mention other problems like sleep disorders, depression and stress.

All phototherapies are broadly classified into targeted and non-targeted types. The latter simply requires additional exposure to sunlight, either directly or by use of lightboxes. The targeted types, on the other hand, make use of sources such as LEDs, lamps and lasers to focus high-intensity light rays in a specific spectrum on the problem patch of skin.

Red light therapy is one of the targeted techniques, focused on getting rid of wrinkles below the eyes. One important distinction to remember is that this is different from infrared rays that cannot be seen directly by the human eye. Researchers at Germany's University of Ulm showed how visible rays in the red spectrum are medically beneficial.

The whole thing hinges on the well-being of elastin. This is the protein that makes skin elastic by producing collagen as required. As a person ages, the fibers start breaking down, and the skin therefore starts producing less collagen. It starts losing its elasticity and ends up looking more and more stretched and baggy. That's what causes wrinkled skin.

The core cause of this dysfunction is because of water layers around the elastin fibers. Subjecting such affected areas of the skin with light rays at a high intensity leads to a sudden spurt in blood circulation, in the process freeing up the elastin to resume their work. Collagen starts being produced like before, and the skin starts regaining its earlier healthiness.

This is a simple process that is entirely painless and non-invasive. Abnormalities such as wounds and wrinkles will go away quickly. If the skin is already healthy, this procedure will give it a new healthy sheen as the excess collagen makes an impact.

Beauty salons and skincare clinics today have FDA-approved devices for phototherapy treatments. It's also possible to buy devices that can help people do the same thing at home. This will be a headgear unit that subjects the area around the eyes to the rays, along with goggles that keep the eyes safe.

It is advisable to use phototherapy devices only for a very short duration. It's helpful when used as suggested, but overuse where high-intensity light is focused on a small part of the skin will cause harm. The typical recommended usage is for one-minute treatments for three or at most four times a day. Anyone with other skin disorders or medical conditions should first consult with their physician or dermatologist.




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