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Restylane Vital offers an excellent way to complement a variety of surgical and non-surgical aesthetic treatments e.g microdermabrasion, intense pulsed light treatment and fractional laser treatment, as well as other Restylane products, and can be combined with skin care creams to achieve a rejuvenated skin appearance.

Restylane Vital can be used to hydrate, revitalise and restore the skins hydration where needed. The areas of the skin where the Restylane Vital range is ideal are:

1. The crows feet area (combined if necessary with anti-wrinkle injections)

2. The area between the nose and the upper lip

3. The neck and upper chest areas (the decolletage)

4. The back of the hands

Call my clinic Face & Eye on 08458 332233 and speak to Amanda Baker, our specialist aesthetics nurse practitioner, who can provide more information. Amanda herself has undergone this treatment and speak from first hand experience. Visit the clinic website at www.faceandeye.co.uk

Visit www.restylane.co.uk for more information about the whole Restylane range

My clinic Face & Eye has a highly qualified and very experienced nurse practitioner, Gaynor Ritchie, who puts clients very much at their ease. Gaynor is extremely enthusiastic but also very discrete about her treatments which are very successful. She is attracting a lot of male as well as female clients for hair reduction treatment. Although most clients expect hair reduction to be undertaken using a laser, hair reduction is actually undertaken using intense pulsed light (IPL). The use of intense pulsed light in the permanent reduction or removal of unwanted hair, together with advances in computer technology have meant that individual treatments can be designed specifically to suit the skin type, colour and variety of hair of each client (including asian clients). New technology allows the selection of the most appropriate and effective wavelength and pulse characteristics to remove hair, unlike lasers which can only use one wavelength and therefore only treat some skin types successfully. IPL is able to deliver much higher levels of energy safely to the hair follicle than a laser. Nevertheless, in spite of this better technology, most clients still enquire about “laser” hair removal”).

Go to www.faceandeye.co.uk for more information about this and other non-surgical treatments available.

Lower lid blepharoplasty (cosmetic eyelid surgery, eye bag removal) can be combined with Coleman fat injections which can help to camouflage the outer tear trough defects when these cannot be adequately managed by fat repositioning alone.

The fat is harvested from the outer buttock area or thigh via a tiny incision which is closed with a singe stitch. The fat is spun down in a centrifuge to separate the cells from blood and local anaesthetic solution. The fat cells are then injected with a fine blunt cannula into the outer aspects of the eyelids at the completion of the blepharoplasty. This can be done under “twilight anaesthesia” on a day case basis.

Scarless surgery for blocked tear ducts (endoscopic DCR). This is particularly suitable for the patient who wears glasses or who is young and wants to avoid a permanent visible scar in a very visible location on the face. Read about this at: http://www.eyelidsurgery.co.uk/conditions/blb-wateringeye.htm

Tear Trough Restylane injections have proved to be a very popular mode of treatment for patients with dark circles under the eyes. These dark circles create a very tired look. The injections take a few minutes to perform and in the hands of a skilled and experienced oculoplastic surgeon yield very good results with a very high patient satisfaction rate. Experience has shown that patients experience very little discomfort during the treatment and the application of a topical anaesthetic cream a few minutes before the treatment is all that is required. To date I have not had to resort to any anaesthetic injections for any of my patients. Patients generally return for top-up injections 6-9 months following their initial injections. The injections have also proved popular with patients who have undergone lower lid blepharoplasty surgery for eye bag removal elsewhere and who have been left with rather hollow looking lower eyelids and who do not wish to undergo further surgery e.g. Coleman fat injections.

Your eyes are precious: why entrust them to anyone other than an oculoplastic surgeon?

Can the injections be combined with anti-wrinkle injections? Yes they can.

For more information on Tear Trough Restylane injections visit:

www.faceandeye.co.uk/face/teartroughrejuvenation.html

Mr Leatherbarrow has recently become an inter-specialty member of BAAPS. He was an invited speaker at the annual meeting of BAAPS in Chester in Sept 2008 giving a lecture on the management of complications of eyelid surgery. The major emphasis of this lecture was the very careful preoperative ophthalmic examination of any patient requesting cosmetic eyelid surgery to avoid predictable and preventable ophthalmic complications of such surgery by the non-expert.

Many patients are very anxious about their surgery and many fear general anaesthesia. “Twilight” anaesthesia is the answer for many such patients. I work very closely with a very skilled consultant anaesthetist who has over 15 years of experience in giving intravenous sedation using a combination of Midazolam and Propofol specifically for patients undergoing a wide variety of oculoplastic procedures. These agents provide safe conscious sedation allowing the painless delivery of local anaesthetic injections at the beginning of your operation. The agents are then titrated to your own needs so that you are comfortable throughout the procedure. You have very little recollection of most of the procedure and the recovery from the effects of the sedation is very rapid. This allows many procedures to be carried out on a day case basis.

Brow lifts

It is generally assumed that brow lifting surgery is very invasive and requires incisions in the scalp. This is not the case.  Many patients can undergo a brow lift with the surgeon only having to use an upper lid blepharoplasty incision with the scar hidden within the skin crease. This is achieved using a small dissolvable implant referred to as the “Endotine Transbleph”. It can be combined with the use of anti-wrinkle injections to achieve the best long term results. For more information on this new technique visit: 

www.eyelidsurgery.co.uk/treatments/blb-brow.htm