One of the quickest, easiest, and most natural approaches to addressing aging skin is dermal fillers that contain hyaluronic acid (HA). A prime benefit of these fillers is that they work effectively with your body to plump up sagging and lined skin since HA is a substance that’s already found in many of your tissues.
At McHugh Plastic Surgery, Dr. Thomas McHugh offers a full line of cosmetic injectables, including dermal fillers that contain HA. In this month’s blog post, we’re going to take a quick dive into the science behind HA when it comes to boosting the health of your skin.
At its core, HA is a humectant, which means that it retains moisture. In fact, one HA molecule can bind up to 1,000 times its weight in water.
In this role, you can find HA throughout your body, namely in your eyes, in your skin, and in the synovial fluid in your joints that encourage movement. All of these areas rely on moisture for good health, and HA answers the call as a type of storage system.
As you age, your production of HA slowly declines. As a result, your joints are less lubricated and your skin loses elasticity and tone, not to mention a fair amount of plumpness due to the deficit of moisture-retaining HA.
You may have seen face creams that tout HA as its prime ingredient. While there’s little doubt that a boost of HA in your skin can reduce the signs of aging, do these topical creams and lotions work? The answer is yes and no.
Your skin is designed to protect you from the world and forms a shield to do so. This same shield can also prevent many ingredients in topical creams from getting to where they can benefit your skin the most — deep in the dermal layers.
In order for an HA cream to penetrate your skin, it needs to contain very small HA molecules. Unfortunately, while these smaller molecules can get deeper into your tissues, their smaller size also means they won’t retain as much water.
With injectable dermal fillers, we deliver the HA deep into your tissues where they can do the most good. Not only do we bypass the outer, shielding layers of your skin, we can deliver larger molecules of HA that retain far more moisture.
It’s for this reason that dermal fillers are so effective. The HA that we inject into your skin provides immediate volume and continues to provide volume as it binds to water.
Eventually, the HA from the dermal filler is flushed out of your body, at which point you can simply return for another round of HA injections.
Most of our clients come to us for dermal fillers to address the following areas:
Since HA is biocompatible with your body, we can safely use these dermal fillers almost anywhere where your skin can use a little boost in volume and moisture.
If you’d like to fight back against the signs of aging with HA, please contact our office in The Woodlands, Texas, to set up your cosmetic injectable appointment.
