Sagging skin and wrinkles on the face are often the first things that people rush to correct. In fact, women and men around the world are not giving skin agers a chance and many are embarking on anti-aging treatments long before the skin succumbs to gravity and to chance. Anti-aging treatments now extend to the neck, the décolleté, the hands and even the back! So as it turns out, as it gets harder to tell one’s age, the tougher it gets to hide it, as the world scrutinizes for signs of age on the body.
The latest anxiety is in the leg joints. Kninkles, or knee wrinkles first got it’s publicity piece several years ago when Catherine Zeta-Jones glided over the red carpet looking picture perfect except for her crinkly and pouchy knees. Need I explain further why the world was devastated that a normal (but famous) human being was not allowed to look aged, even in the knees? Perhaps there isn’t a need to. This was simply the cue to start looking into perfecting our knees, like how we have done with our faces.
Perfect Pins
Some doctors thought knee anxiety was just a fad, but ask any woman used to wearing above-knee skirts or minis, sagging fat and wrinkles above knees can be pretty traumatizing. Fact of the matter is, our knees need to be able to support our activities, take our weight on kneeling and they face the same scrutiny as our jawlines. We spoke to Dr Low Chai Ling, who devised the Bees Knees Program at the SW1 Clinic, a first of its kind in the local aesthetics scene, showing how current (and also how far ahead) this beauty clinic is with anti-aging treatments. A reduction in collagen production results in loose skin over time, at the same time, cellulite appears as fat pouches out between connective tissue fibers, resulting in a wrinkly and lumpy appearance of the knees.
Bees Knees works on the deeper layers of the skin using Thermage, an FDA-approved no-downtime radiofrequency treatment to tighten the skin. One treatment of Thermage for the face typically sees skin tightening results within the next 3 to 6 months. In the knees, a larger and stronger body tip is used to treat the skin around and on the knees for a lift. Exilis Body Magic is applied to the same parts as well as the knobly parts of the knee to tighten the skin and to get rid of deep, unsightly lines. These treatments end with a pampering CelluMelt II mask to hydrate and plump up the skin which gets rid of the rough texture of weathered knees.
Knee Skin Discolouration
What about irksome-looking discolouration of the knees? Dr Low suggests Fraxel Light, a signature treatment at SW1 Clinic, which is a microresurfacing laser peel which helps to tone down the leathery-looking look of aging knees with its skin brightening and skin tightening effects.
Maintenance
Kninkles may sound cute but remember that this leg joint is highly used so inevitably, kninkles will probably recur if you are not careful. So keep up with your quad exercises so that the skin stays lifted, or see Dr Low, who has devised a slew of quarterly treatments to keep your knees looking young and supple.