Because it can be easy to mistake a harmless brown spot (and most of them are perfectly benign) for a pre-cancerous or cancerous skin lesion, In New York, NYC, and Manhattan, Dr. Yagoda highly recommends getting a skin cancer screening before having your brown spots removed. After all, if you’re seeing cosmetic signs of damage from sun exposure, it pays to investigate whether other forms of damage might be present as well.Whether you call those dark patches of pigment on your skin brown spots, liver spots, or age spots, what you’re really looking at is most likely a sun spot (solar lentigo). Although they tend to make their appearance after about age 40, these brown- or black-colored spots are caused by sun exposure. The reason they show up in our middle years is that as we age, our skin’s ability to recover from sun exposure diminishes. Women and men who spend time in the sun will often notice these spots on areas that are typically exposed—the face, the backs of the hands, the upper chest, arms and shoulders.
If you’d like to remove age spots, the IPL (intense pulsed light) treatment available at Dr. Yagoda’s Manhattan/ NYC office is ideal. Dr. Yagoda is one of NYC’s most experience and well-respected female facial plastic surgeons, is the first to offer Clareon intense pulsed light (IPL) therapy with krypton-based technology. (Krypton is a kind of “noble gas,” not Superman’s home planet.) Unlike conventional IPL therapy that uses xenon lamps, Clareon uses krypton to optimally target blood and melanin for better results with less energy. The new, patented krypton technology provides better and safer results in a fraction of the time it takes the competition. In addition, the Clareon has a built-in chiller in the handpiece. This means that the skin is instantaneously and temporarily frozen before and during the treatment, making it virtually painless.
Although IPL can also be used to permanently reduce excess hair on the face and body (read more about IPL for hair reduction, it also has amazing applications for skin rejuvenation, acne inflammation, and treatment of vascular and pigmented lesions.
IPL is a non-invasive treatment, usually delivered in a series of three to four sessions, spaced two weeks apart. IPL can be used on the skin of the face, neck, chest, arms and legs, and can improve the following conditions:
- Brown spots
- Sun damage
- Broken capillaries
- Rosacea
- Inflammation and redness associated with acne
- Unwanted hair
Clareon was developed and is manufactured by Novalis Medical, LLC, a leading manufacturer of pulsed-light technology.