Somehow I reached my fiftieth year without ever having had a facial, much less any other kind of anti-aging treatment or procedure. I’m not sure how that happened but I suspect it’s because I’ve been blessed with good genes since, despite the abuse I’ve dished out to my face and neck, it always looked pretty decent.
Until this last year, that is.
Oopsie, that’s when the perimenopause thing kicked in and suddenly my skin began looking dry and creepy. (Argh, that is a word that should be reserved for women like Gloria Swanson or Bette Davis—really aged and, even more, dead!) Wrinkles started showing up around my eyes and between my eyebrows. And blemishes that used to surface and resolve themselves in a few days now just sat there as swollen, sullen inruptions. That’s my own word to describe the fact that they just would not come out. They seemed to turn inward and just SIT there for days looking ugly.
That’s when I got myself to the Escobedo Skin Center in Austin, Texas to begin learning about … well … my skin options. Dr. Mike Escobedo and his personable aesthetician, Diana de la Torre, were most helpful in putting the confusing lexicon of options in context.
They are adamant that it all begins with good basic skin care. Facials are a very effective part of that foundation. Without good basic skin care, other procedures are ineffective. In other words, basic skin care is the weak link in the chain. So, I made the sacrifice for you WomenBloom members and had a facial so you could come to your own conclusions.
As Diana pointed out, teeth and skin both require good maintenance to remain healthy and vibrant. Think about basic skin care as flossing and regular teeth cleaning for your face and décolletage. That’s a word Diana introduced me to and it means your lower neck and chest. Whatever you do to your face should be done to the other two. I haven’t done that over the years and I’m paying for it now.
Diana asked me to say one thing I’d like to change about my skin. I told her that I sometimes wanted to slap my face around because I felt like my skin needed stimulation; it just didn’t look lively and awake. No problem, she said, that’s a common situation with older skin. With that, we got started.
She told me the phases of a good facial: cleansing, toning, exfoliating, extracting, and then treatment masks to help tighten up and moisturize the skin. She agreed that stimulation was a critical part of skin care. That goal gave her the information she needed to create a custom facial for me.
We began with a steamer to cleanse and help open up my pores. Diana then went through the steps using a custom blend of products every step of the way. A hydrating citrus toner. An exfoliating tomato mask rich in alpha hydroxy acid layered with paprika pepper to generate some heat (that skin stimulation!) and some honey and lavender on my neck and chest.
Once I’d been exfoliated, Diana was able to see areas that needed some extra help, meaning I needed some extractions. This process was the least pleasant although by no means intolerable. Getting out those blackheads and milia is simply a necessary evil and a good aesthetician is better able to see and gently remove them because the top layer of skin has been exfoliated.
What are milia? I did a little research, and had my feelings validated concerning my “inruptions.” Milia are those hard little white bumps that form under the skin and are difficult to remove. Basically they are a collection of skin cells that have become trapped under the skin and walled off into a cyst-like object. They can occur for several reasons including sun damage, aging skin with a thicker epidermis, or use of heavy cosmetics that keep them from reaching the surface of your skin.
