The quest to achieve and maintain flawless and beautiful skin is something that causes thousands of people every single year to book themselves in for a skin treatment. Some of the best methods of treatment when it comes to rejuvenating the skin involve the use of needles, but not the stereotypical ones that you would think of when it comes to dermal fillers or injectables. The needles we’re talking about are much smaller and are more commonly found on a dermapen or dermaroller as a microneedling treatment, with many aestheticians performing these treatments to help patients get clearer skin using a simple principle of healing controlled wounds and regeneration.
Microneedling (either via the use of a dermapen or dermaroller) and mesotherapy are two of the skin treatments that utilise miniscule needles to improve the tone and texture of the skin, but there’s a lot of confusion around what the treatments actually do and how they’re different to each other.
What are the main differences between microneedling and mesotherapy?
Both treatments involve the use of needles, but the techniques used, the needles themselves, the depth they are designed to reach and the conditions that they are used to treat set them apart from each other.
Microneedling is a treatment that is performed to create a number of controlled wounds on the skin to trigger the body into entering its healing process. These miniscule wounds in the skin trigger the body to respond to the problem by creating new collagen in the treated area (which is responsible for giving the skin a youthful look) to heal, refresh and renew the skin both internally and externally.
Mesotherapy was originally developed by the French as a method of injecting medicine into subcutaneous fat, but it has since been redeveloped to be used for skin rejuvenation and differs from microneedling in a few ways. For starters, mesotherapy uses a cocktail of vitamins, enzymes and minerals that are injected beneath the surface of the skin using just one needle.
What makes a good candidate for microneedling?
For a patient, the main goal for undergoing a microneedling treatment is simply just the rejuvenation of the skin. The microneedling process actually helps to promote the regeneration of cells and exfoliates from a deeper level, allowing the outer layers of the skin to be replaced by fresh new cells. It’s particularly good at treating;
- Acne scarring on or around the face
- Wrinkles and fine lines around the eyes and neck
- Scarring and stretch marks on the body
The creation of a controlled wound stimulates the wound healing processes within the body, triggering the production of collagen and elastin which are considered as the foundational blocks that create healthy skin. This makes it a perfect solution to fight the signs of ageing and scarring that cause issues with the skin.
What makes a good candidate for mesotherapy?
Mesotherapy treatments tend to be sought out by patients who are looking to refresh the appearance of their skin and add a bit of life and glow back to it. It actually improves the health of the skin by adding a level of hydration and nourishment that help the internal cells to stay healthy for much longer, which helps to keep the skin looking young. Mesotherapy is best suited for patients who suffer from;
- Acne scarring
- Dull or dehydrated skin
- Fine lines and wrinkles
- Hyperpigmentation
In a difference to microneedling, mesotherapy is more suited to issues that begin a bit deeper beneath the surface of the skin like dehydration and more advanced ageing of the tissues. It can even be used to target subcutaneous fat and cellulite on the body at a depth of around 4mm beneath the surface, although the majority of aestheticians tend to work to a maximum depth of 2mm.
How should you choose between microneedling and mesotherapy?
Well, for starters your first thought should be directly related to the issues that you are looking to treat and the results that you are looking to achieve. Mesotherapy is brilliant to help the cells and tissues beneath the skin to be healthy, but microneedling is much more effective when it comes to reducing the signs of ageing on the surface.
All of this is an area that will be discussed with your aesthetician during your initial consultation, to discover the reasons why you are looking to undergo treatment and to figure out what matches your and your skin to a tee.
Which treatment is more comfortable?
Technically this will depend on the individual patient undergoing a treatment as everyone has their own individual levels of tolerance, but mesotherapy tends to be the treatment that is more comfortable during the procedure as it only utilises one needle where microneedling using a dermapen or dermaroller uses multiple.
After treatment, it all depends on how you react and both are considered to have similar levels of downtime associated with them. As both are minimally invasive and are performed by puncturing the skin, it’s incredibly likely that you’ll experience some form of redness and swelling for a few days after the treatment.