Why Your Ageing Face is Like Your Favourite Armchair

To help you understand the effects of ageing and what can be done to restore some of your youthfulness, I often liken the face to your favourite armchair.

We all have a favourite armchair. An armchair is generally made up of a wooden frame, cushioning and a material cover. You purchased it when it was new and over the years you have sat in your armchair, watched TV in it, possibly spilled wine and coffee on it, forgotten to plump up the cushions at times and now it no longer looks new.

This is a bit like your face – you have lived life with it and it will show sleepless nights, sun damage, poor nutrition and lack of care. However just as an armchair can be restored, much can be done with your face and reversing the effects of ageing.

So let’s start with the covers on your armchair; your skin. Spilling coffee on the covers will leave dark marks which can be hard to remove. The marks that can appear on your skin with age are pigment patches, also known as ‘age spots’ or ‘sun spots’ which can give a lack of uniformity of colour make your skin look older.  There are various treatments that can help these ‘stains’. We can treat pigmentation with our Lynton IPL machine to help fade dark spots and then protect the skin from further irregular pigmentation with lavish use of sunscreens,  just as you would use Scotch Guard to protect the fabric of your armchair from further coffee spills.

Now to the red wine you’ve spilt. Red marks appearing on the face in the form of thread veins or broken capillaries for instance can be effectively treated with Lynton IPL or short wave diathermy. A little bit like using Stain Devil on the fabric of your armchair we find that taking away discoloration will give your ‘covers’ a brighter, fresher and newer appearance.

As your armchair ages the fabric starts to thin. Likewise your skin starts to thin and it can be encouraged to thicken by producing more collagen with IPL skin rejuvenating treatments or skin needling.

Now onto the cushioning of your armchair. The cushions are like the fat pads in your skin which help to give shape and contour to your face. These fat pads start to move as you experience the effects of ageing and filler injections can help to restore the ‘padding’ where it has been lost so restoring the loss of volume and lessen lines and folds.

Finally, the armchair has a wooden frame and your face has a skull underneath. The wooden frame of a chair doesn’t change, but your skull does. As you age the skull starts to shrink which means the whole shape of the face changes. Nothing can stop this from happening, but by addressing the cushioning and the fabric covering you can do a lot to give your ‘armchair’ a new lease of life!

Want to read more about the effects of ageing? Read our blog here

Originally published May 2, 2016 17:36pm, updated March 5, 2018