Secret RF
A new treatment promises to turn back the years by zapping your face with radio frequency. Carissa Casey gave it a test run.
The thing about growing old gracefully is that fillers and botox must be used with care. An immobile face, full of god knows what, doesn’t make us look younger.
It just makes us look like we’ve spent a lot of money to make our older face seem younger. What we really want is some magic potion that will give us back our youthful glow, blur those fi ne lines and wrinkles and take that awful creepy look off the skin around the neck.
TREATMENT
Enter Secret RF, now available at the South William Clinic & Spa (southwilliamspa.com) in Dublin. This treatment isn’t about injecting anything artificial into the skin or freezing muscles so that we can neither laugh nor frown naturally.
Rather it stimulates the production of the skin’s own wonder substance, collagen. Its delivery is a dramatic update on the existing therapy of micro needling.
With Secret RF, the microneedles emit small amounts of radio frequency energy into the skin which is what stimulates the collagen. The technical term is that it enables ‘dermal remodelling’, or in laywoman’s terms, the treatment tricks the skin into becoming much younger than it actually is.
I’m as big a sucker for a ‘younger skin’ sales pitch as the next woman but the before and after pictures for
Secret RF treatments are also hugely impressive. So I decided to try it out. All my skin related issues fall into the ‘age-related’ bracket; fine lines, wrinkles, large pores - I could go on forever. (Secret RF also works for people with acne scarring, or uneven skin tone or a host of other issues.)
Dr Ninnette de Klerk is the resident skin guru at South William Clinic and she took me through the procedure. The first step was a thorough cleanse, followed by the application of a topical anaesthetic cream. That takes time to work so she explained what she would be doing next. Using a hand held gizmo with 64 tiny microneedles, she would treat my entire face and neck at different depths. For skin laxity (that awful saggy look) and scarring, the needles need to go deep which stimulates both the collagen and elastane. Used at more shallow levels, the needles treat the tone and texture of the skin.
For my treatment the needles went to 2mm around the jawline and then 1.5mm elsewhere. On a second pass they went to 0.5mm. (The deepest level of 3.5mm is not used on the face because the skin isn’t thick enough. It is used on the body to treat stretch marks, for example.)
Because the needles are so small, there’s no real damage to the existing outer layer of the skin. All the magic happens below the surface. And because it is adjustable and delivered by hand, it’s possible to tailor each treatment to the client’s needs and skin.
I wouldn’t say the process was entirely pain free but it was pretty manageable - I’ve had far worse medical treatments. People with a low pain threshold could always take a painkiller beforehand but Dr Ninnette advises that you talk to your therapist first.
For example, she points out, asprin or disprin will thin the blood and may result in more bleeding during the treatment.
When we finished, my face was pretty red and blotchy but that eased surprisingly quickly. For the first few days afterwards
I used a very gentle cleanser and steered well clear of any active skin ingredients (retinol or vitamin C). Despite being warned that it would take at least a week to notice any improvement, I studied my skin everyday looking for the vaguest glimpse of the youth I left behind long ago. And lo and behold, it arrived. Within about three weeks my skin was positively glowing.
The tone and texture dramatically improved. Some of the lines had been spirited away and even the larger wrinkles looked smoother and less obvious. I was hooked.
RESULTS
The best results can be seen after three treatments, four to six weeks apart. My second treatment was a lot tougher but I reasoned that it would be even more beneficial. Dr Ninnette explained this time she was upping the radio frequency. On the first treatment, the frequency was set at 30 percent, but this time round it would be 40 percent. This meant that more heat was going into skin which would result in more tissue coagulation and therefore more collagen production.
To be honest, I slightly regretted not taking some kind of painkiller in advance and would probably recommend taking one at the second pass. It also took longer for my face to return to normal. It was blotchy all the way up to bedtime.
Yet again, it took a week or so to start noticing the results. And this time my neck showed huge improvement. That crepe-iness was a lot less apparent and the skin was much smoother.
As an anti-aging treatment, the Secret RF gets a thumbs up from me. My face has a normal range of movement and I still look like me, but a younger and healthier version of me, with that youthful glow I thought was gone forever and a neck that could pass for ten years younger than my current age.
What more could you ask for?
For more on Secret RF visit southwilliamspa.com