Other than the fact that they don’t need a patient to undergo surgery, hence the name “non-surgical”, there are a number of other areas where they differ from their surgical counterparts too. For starters, there’s very little discomfort and recovery time when compared to more invasive procedures, with a number of treatments allowing patients to get back to their normal daily lives pretty much immediately. There is also much less risk associated with them than there is posed by surgery (like infection, anaesthetic reactions and scarring) as well as much less severe risk of side effects.
With millions of non-surgical treatments performed every year around the world, we’re going to take a deep dive into what the most popular treatments are and which ones are performed regularly at Better Body Clinics.
Injectable Treatments
We’ll start off with the two most popular non-surgical treatments that are performed every year, anti-wrinkle injections and dermal fillers. Between them, these two treatments make up over 10 million non-surgical facial treatments every year. For context, for treatments that were performed worldwide in 2020, in third place was laser hair removal with less than 2 million treatments performed, and fourth place was less than 600,000 treatments carried out.
Anti-wrinkle injections are a wonderful solution to fight the appearance of wrinkles and lines on the face, and have been used by celebrities and the general public alike to get younger looking skin. They operate on a fairly basic premise by blocking the nerves that cause the wrinkles from operating, causing them to not function. Over time, this helps the skin by stopping the production of further wrinkles whilst also smoothing out existing wrinkles as the muscles can’t be used to make them any worse.
Dermal fillers on the other hand are a slightly different treatment, and while they are still injected the solution used in them is made up of hyaluronic acid which is used to provide different results. As the name suggests, dermal fillers are used to fill in any gaps to smooth out the appearance of wrinkles in the skin, but they can also be used to plump up target areas such as the lips or bridge of the nose to improve the appearance of the face.
Laser Hair Removal
As we mentioned previously, laser hair removal treatments came in third place behind the two different injectable treatments and with the results that these treatments are capable of achieving, it’s not hard to see why. Laser hair removal treatments are a non-surgical method of hair removal are capable of removing up to 90% of the unwanted body hair within a targeted area for good in a course of just 6 sessions. The reason behind the logic to undergo a course of treatments is simply down to the way the hair grows, and not every hair on your body started growing at the same time. Even if you narrow it down to just your forearms, some of the hairs will be relatively new in their growth cycle and some will be nearing their end anyway. By using laser energy to cause a thermal reaction within the follicle, it is effectively destroying the hair from the inside out. The problem is that depending on where the hair is in it’s growth cycle, it may not be affected by the laser energy and that’s where a course comes in. After 6 sessions, it’s likely that the vast majority of the follicles will have been caught at some point in their growth cycle where the laser can destroy the follicle, resulting in permanent hair loss in the treated area.
Fat Freezing
The fat freezing treatment, or cryolipolysis as it’s known scientifically, is the process of cooling the fat cells beneath the skin to a point where they are unable to function any more and the body begins to break them down as waste. While that may sound like it has the potential to be dangerous, it’s actually a lot safer than you think. During a treatment, special applicator cups are applied to the skin and the cold temperature works in combination with vacuum suction to draw the skin (and fat) into the cup to be cooled. Because the treatment is designed to operate at a specific temperature that is cold enough to affect the fat cells without causing damage to any surrounding tissues or structures within the skin, the only cells that are damaged are the fat cells. Once they are rendered as non-functional, the body breaks them down and they are passed naturally through the body’s waste systems, resulting in a noticeable reduction in fat that with results that start to appear gradually and naturally.
Cellulite Reduction
While it may not be right at the top of the popularity list, cellulite reduction treatments are becoming more and more popular all the time as a non-surgical body treatment with everyone wanting to have flawless Instagram ready skin. For women more than men, the appearance of cellulite (although it’s completely natural and totally harmless) causes major confidence issues with their bodies. Thankfully, the HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound) cellulite reduction treatment is capable of reducing the appearance of cellulite on the body and in some cases, getting rid of it completely.
Cellulite forms when the fibrous bands that connect the skin to the muscles below it are irregularly tightened. When they tighten, they pull the outer layers of the skin down which pushes them against the fat beneath, resulting in a dimpled and uneven appearance.
By targeting the structural layers of the skin at specific depths, HIFU is able to trigger a thermal reaction within the fat cells that effectively damages and destroys them from the inside out whilst boosting the production of collagen to smooth the external appearance of the skin, resulting in a smooth and dimple free finish.
