A dramatic physical change in appearance once required a few discreet weeks out of town, where women of means (it was nearly always women, and they had to have the means) waited for the swelling to go down, the red incision to fade, the bruises to dissolve.
Now people pop into a quasi-medical beauty salon on their lunch hour.
Personally, I’ve vowed to be the museum exhibit for what it looks like to be this age without “work,” workouts, acids, dyes, or exfoliants. But as a journalist I need to track hot trends—and the latest is CoolSculpting. Otherwise known as cryolipolysis. Or as Bruce Fabel, the president of Ideal Image, puts it, “We freeze your fat to death and you poop it out.”
I find his candor refreshing.
CoolSculpting is meant to tackle stubborn clusters of fat cells. It’s not for weight loss or overall reduction, it’s for the lucky frustrated ones who are wonderfully fit but just can’t shake (or rather, can) those love handles.
Photo by e-ta-i via Creative Commons
Fabel had ’em himself. “I work out every day, I watch what I eat, but I just couldn’t get rid of them except when I trained for a marathon and lost 20 pounds and then my face looked drawn.” With CoolSculpting, he says, “I was able to freeze that fat away.” All the Ideal Image centers (which are scattered across North America) have two machines, so you can sit there eating snacks and checking email while the blubber on your inner thigh and your upper back fat get frozen.
Lynda Rix, a registered nurse who works at the Sunset Hills center, tells me that “you have to have two inches of pinchable fat.” Which would not be a problem. “If it’s firm or fibrous, which is the more unhealthy fat, it doesn’t work, because it’s got to be able to draw into a cup.” Nor will it work for people (or shar peis) who just have loose skin. Applicators use vacuum suction to draw the adipose tissue into the applicator cup, where it’s frozen. No anesthesia, no needles, no incisions, no amphetamine diet pills. The CoolSculpting brochure says, “Fear no swimsuit,” and I imagine myself like the scales of justice, weighing a puddle of lycra in one hand and crystallized fat cells in the other.
“It’s really good for giving men that V shape or women that hourglass shape,” Rix notes. “There’s one attachment that’s for debulking; it’s a larger cup. It’s not going to do so much sculpting, just take more fat and zap it. Usually they will want to come back and get more sculpting to get the smooth shape.”
Now that I’m here, I feel a strange fascination—what else is new?
“Allergan is rolling out a fabulous new filler, Voluma, that goes on the upper outer cheek area and lifts the face up,” Fabel says. “It’s tactile and sticky. We pull the skin back a little and then do the injection, and it opens the nasolabial folds and lifts the cheeks.”
After that will come BroadBand Light, which can reduce brown spots and spider veins.
And there’s a new app, Ideal You, that takes a photo of you and applies Ulth
Courtesy of Ideal Image
Lynda Rix, before Ultherapy
erapy, wrinkle relaxers, fillers, and a few other fountain-of-youth techniques, so you can see how you could look.
So wait—what’s Ultherapy? Rix brightens. Actually she’s already pretty bright, because she’s had Ultherapy, and she swears it gave her glowing skin as well as a clean-line chin. Ultherapy uses microfocused ultrasound to lift the neck, chin, and brow—again without surgery—and stimulate the collagen and elastin production that aging decreases. “Unfortunately, your body stops producing collagen,” Rix explains. “That’s why you see a lack of elasticity and you see gravity pulling the skin down. It’s like an old, dry rubber band that
Courtesy of Ideal Image
...and after Ultherapy
cracks when you tug on it. With SAS—superficial muscular aponeurotic system—we go down into that layer. It creates little microspots of damage at three different levels within the skin, and that creates collagen production.
“It’s a little uncomfortable,” she admits. “We have people take ibuprofen beforehand, just for comfort.” How often do people do this? “It takes you back about five years, and you might only need to do it every five years,” Rix says. Although if you wait that long, you’re just aging on a time delay. But meanwhile you could turn to other areas… “We’re currently doing face and neck, and they’ve just gotten cleared for décolletage, the chest area. You know that creping of the skin between the breasts as you age?”
Her question’s rhetorical, but I wince and nod. Later, in my car, I can’t help but glance at all the flaws that have just been named for me: marionette lines, nasolabial folds, parentheses, vertical lip lines…
I’m not even game for Botox. At first, it was its origin as a deadly neurotoxin that gave me pause.
Now I’m more afraid that if I started, I wouldn’t know where to stop.
