It’s two weeks before the Academy Awards in Hollywood and skin clinics, including our surgery centre, are booked to overflowing! Actresses of all ages are frantic to get their bodies ship-shape before they walk the red carpet in daring designer frocks. Cleavages must glow, shoulders must be porcelain-smooth and thighs firm and cellulite-free. Let’s face it: this is one occasion when the paparazzi are merciless, zooming in on any lumps, bumps or sags. Not surprisingly, ordinary spa massage, hot mud baths and seaweed wraps are simply not enough for celebs, who want treatments that change the look of the body. Some are temporary, while others are as permanent as modern aesthetic science can make them.

 

BANISH THE CELLULLITE

Over the years, there’s been a plethora of cellulite treatments that promise smooth and orange-peel-free skin. The primary causes of cellulite remain poor blood and lymph circulation, excess weight gain, hormonal imbalances (excess oestrogen) and toxin build-up from a poor diet. Yet few new treatments produce results significant enough to stand up to close scrutiny. So for immediate – if only temporary results – nothing beats cryotherapy and thermogenic.

Soft, endemic cellulite, with its pale, puffy look, is best treated with cryotherapy. The ‘freezing’ sensation, brought about by various plant extracts, keeps the area cold for several hours, which, in turn, shifts water-logged fatty tissue away from problem area. Skin looks smoother and an obvious centimeter loss can be measured. Better still, untrasound is often used to drive cooling gels deep into the tissues for more dramatic resuts.

Thermogenic therapy, on the other hand, addresses hard and lumpy cellulite. Put simply, this is the type of orange-peel-skin that hurts when it’s pinched and looks slightly yellowish under the skin. Instead of cold treatment, heat is applied to the skin via a cream that creates what is known as ‘pseudo heat’, or chemical heat, and the body is wrapped in cling film. Think of a cold stick of butter melting and changing shape on a hot stove, and you get the picture. Hardened fat cells turn liquid-like and toxins pass through the capillaries and out of the body. The result? A much tighter midriff and waistline.

“FOR THE BEVERLY HILLS CROWD, ANY OR ALL OF THE ABOVE ARE THE ELIXIR FOR THE BODY BEAUTIFUL – ACHIEVED, AS ALWAYS IN THE US, WITHIN A SHORT SPACE OF TIME.”

GET LIFTING

Body Enzyme treatments – probably the best ‘body lifts’ on the market – seem to work near miracles. An enzyme-rich paste is slathered onto the body for the express purpose of draining away excess fluid and toxin build-up – something that also benefits spider veins. After the paste is removed, creams packed with lipids, amino acids and major vitamins are massaged into the skin. Why? So that it sheds dull surface cells to reveal new cell activity underneath, making wrinkled thighs plus crepey underarms and cleavage a thing of the pasts (or, at the very least, a reprieve for the evening).

Liposuction is still popular in Beverly Hills but, due to down time and the mandatory body garment one has to wear for some weeks afterwards, more women are tuning to Lipo-dissolve. This medical procedure involves numbing the patient’s skin with a local anaesthetic and mapping injection sites on fatty areas with a surgery pen. A special cocktail of ingredients, such as aminophulline and theophylline, known for their fat-dissolving power, is then injected into the drawn pattern.

In Australia, Dr Michael Zacharia has made headlines with the addition of phospatidylcholine and caffeine to his blend. He believes there is no longer the need for doctors to perform the blind surgery of liposuction, with all its traumas, when the Lipo-dissolve method can be performed safely with very little down time except for a few days of swelling.

For the Beverly Hills crowd, any or all of the above are the elixir for the body beautiful – achieved, as always in the US, within a short space of time. The mindset and treatments may still be exclusive to LA but they are rapidly spreading to the rest of us, who may not have silver-screen aspirations but want to improve a little on God’s handwork, if only for one night.