Looking After Your Skin

WAS it Joan Rivers who said: "I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?"

In my experience most women are happy with their pancreas; it's their skin that bothers them.

And this is especially true for anyone with aggravating skin tags or blemishes such as cherry angiomas, milia (tiny white spots) or assorted warts.

Here at the salon we can treat all these conditions easily and effectively with a mild electric current. But its a not-particularly-glamorous side of the business many people don't know about.

Like Angie, who came in for an eyelash tint and left half an hour later minus the cherry spots on her cleavage which had irritated her for years.

"My little boy was always touching them and drawing attention to them. It was very embarrassing one day in Tesco when he pointed them out to the checkout girl and the whole of the queue behind me heard," says Angie.

For anyone rattled by the three second sting the electric current causes, we can freeze the taps and blobs with a nitrous oxide pen. This is painless, but may need to be repeated.

Another not-so-well-known skin treatment on offer is microdermabrasion. This may be a mouthful, but it's becoming increasingly popular among women of all ages.

It is a way of polishing the skin by blasting it with fine particles of mineral crystals from a hand-held 'gun'. That clears away dead cells and dirt.

Often called 'the lunch-time peel; (it only takes 30 minutes), microdermabrasion re-surfaces the skin and stimulates new cells and collagen. Because it only leaves a slight redness, make-up can be re-applied after an hour and you can return to work with a healthy glow and skin that is refined and refurbished.

More thorough than ordinary exfoliation, it minimises the appearance of fine lines, wrinkles, uneven skin tones, blotches and a dull, leathery or sun-damaged complexion.

After the recommended five treatments - taken about two weeks apart - the results are spectacular.