Become The Queen Of Self Grooming — Dr. Shazia Decodes Braun Beauty Tools For The New Brides

New year, new starts and now we also have the wedding season in the air. Ladies I know when it comes to getting married, you feel a lot of pressure to look prim, proper and positively radiant. This entails hair-free body as well as flawless healthy skin — with or without makeup. And when you do decide to glam up a little and put on some makeup you want to dazzle the world like a glamazon fit to rock the cover of any beauty magazine. Can you do all that without multiple visits to beauty saloons and skincare clinics? — Off course you can! By incorporating Braun Beauty Portfolio in your daily life you can take charge of your skincare and grooming needs without breaking your bank plus save on pesky trips between beauty parlors and skin spas. How Braun can help you shine bright like a diamond? — Lets find out.

Beauty Grooming Starts With Smooth & Hairless Face / Body:

You can’t look feminine and polished with hair sprouting out of your arms, legs and face. So first things first lets fix that. Braun believes in lavishing a modern-day girl with choices: for long term hair removal you can pick Braun Silk-épil 9 SkinSpa or if you’re interested in permanent hair reduction you can choose Braun Silk-expert IPL.

This is one beauty tool that you can rely on explicitly and constantly to deliver long-lasting salon-smooth hair-free skin. I believe today’s modern woman deserves professional hair removal results at home plus a gold standard of experience when she indulges in self-grooming using her beauty tools. The Braun Silk-épil 9 SkinSpa gives you just that plus much more now. Innovation Alert — Recently a NEW Deep Massage pad attachment has been added to the existing skin removal system that can help revitalize the skin. This massage pad adapts to the body’s contours and helps improve skin appearance by stimulating blood circulation. Better circulation in the skin means more oxygen and nutrients reaching the skin. Hence the skin looks more healthy and radiant. The dual combination of the massage applicators and exfoliation pads results in glowing skin and salon worthy results.

If you are looking for permanent hair removal experience from the comfort of your home, then choose Braun Silk-expert. It literally gives you the best experience your money could ever buy. The Braun Silk-expert IPL is the only IPL device in the market that comes with SensoAdaptTM technology. This technology continuously reads your unique skin tone and adapts the light intensity accordingly, avoiding any chance of getting side effects like burns or hyper-pigmentation. To make at home IPL treatments even more accessible, Braun is adding the Silk-expert 3 to its IPL family, which will make IPL treatments even more affordable.

With this one beauty gadget and its multiple interchangeable applicators you can experience quality deep cleansing, exfoliation, revitalization as well as facial hair-removal in one go. By learning how to use Braun FaceSpa to your best advantage you can master smoother, and revitalized skin. Recently Braun has unveiled an exciting new upgrade to the skincare routine with the NEW FaceSpa. Featuring the same superior facial epilating and cleansing brush heads, the 3-in1 facial system now comes complete with a Skin Vitalizing pad that can deliver smoother and revitalized skin in as little as three treatments. The revitalizing pad features easy to clean, non-absorbing silicon tips, that smartly adapt to skin contours and stimulate skin with hundreds of micro-vibrations. With the optional range of brushes, this 3-in-1 facial system allows you to experience up to six different treatments in one device now.

The NEW & Improved Braun Beauty Routine For The New Brides

All new brides-to-be rejoice, as Barun has you covered when it comes to your beauty and grooming needs. Now you can remove unwanted hair as well as deep cleanse, exfoliate and revitalize your skin with Braun all by yourself from the privacy of your own bedroom in three easy to follow steps.

Smoother Skin In Three Days

Braun FaceSpa beauty set empowers you daily to cleanse and exfoliate like a professional. You can use normal or sensitive skin cleansing brushes according to your skin-type to thoroughly clean your skin. The soft bristles of the cleansing brush reach deep into the pores and crevasses of your skin delivering six times better cleansing than manual face washing.

Exfoliation brush can be used to removed dead skin and reveal a more fresh skin. If you have oily and normal skin you can use exfoliation applicators daily or every other day. If you have dry or sensitive skin indulge in exfoliation every 7-15 days.

With the new Skin Vitalizing pad, you can reveal clearer, smoother skin in under a week. Best time to add this massage step is while you’re doing your evening skincare routine. When used in combination with your daily moisturizer or anti-aging skincare serums skin vitalizing pad enhances the efficacy of your skincare products.

To finish off your beauty ritual the beauty sponge applicator can be used to apply your skincare serums and creams on daily basis. This applicator enhances the absorption of your daily skincare giving you more bang-for-your-buck. For a more professional makeup experience you can also use the beauty sponge applicator to apply your skin foundation, as it delivers natural looking results with no caking or tire-marks.

Massage Your Way To Firm And Toned Skin

If you’re new to epilation, use your Silk-épil 9 to remove unwanted hair once a week for the first month. After this, repeat once every 2-4 weeks. The NEW Silk-épil 9 SkinSpa now comes with a Deep Massage pad attachment that can be used once a week to boost circulation and reveal radiant skin. You can use it independently from the epilator head both, in or out of the shower. If you use it with a massage-oil you can enjoy a relaxing shower experience. After your shower you can also use it with a cellulite or skin firming cream to tighten and tone your skin.

Permanent Visible Hair Removal With IPL

Most ladies these days want permanent hair reduction, so they can enjoy freedom in life wearing whatever whenever without thinking — “are my arms and legs hair-free?” After shaving, use your Braun Silk-expert IPL on a weekly basis for visibly permanent hair removal over time. Try using the Gentle mode on any sensitive areas such as underarms and the bikini line.

To compliment your Braun set of Beauty tools the only thing you need additionally is a confident dazzling smile and with that in place, now you are all set and ready to face life and your commitments with smooth, beautiful and glowing skin day-in and day-out.

Looking At Beauty Through The Eyes Of A Dermatologist

Why certain faces attract envious glances, possess the invisible power to turn heads, and invoke a certain chemistry of attraction with human visual cortex? More importantly, what qualities make such faces so special that they can unintentionally become the focus of any lens; ogled and admired by all eyes that happen to gaze upon them? Can we measure attractiveness and recreate it and if the answer is yes, can we impart it onto the faces that genetically lack it? Questions, catechism and more queries — Aesthetic medicine has been on a quest for forever and more to find out answers to questions like these. 

Is beauty divine and bestowed by God only or can mortal hands recreate them?

Beauty might be divine in origin but if we can set benchmarks and quantify it — once that is done that we can attempt to recreate it. Actually plastic surgeons and aesthetic doctors have been carving beautiful visages out of ordinary faces for years now. Ancient Greeks believed beauty lies in the mathematical proportions of a face, rather than just being in the eye of the beholder. 

Lets follow this train of thought and see where it leads us.

 What defines a beautiful face? — Looking from the perspectives of poets, painters and sculptures a unique set of pretty features arranged in a certain mathematical proportion to one another creates a fascinating face. The individual features that invoke beauty include: a smooth convex forehead, a symmetrical set of big eyes highlighted by arched brows, small nose, voluptuous lips, dainty chin, high cheek bones and a chiseled jaw-line, Being a dermatologist I’d add perfectly flawless and radiant skin to this mix and we have perennial beauty at our hands.

Looking At Facial Features:

Research linking beauty to evolutionary psychology has shown that attractiveness perception comes from how our brain perceives information in general coupled with adaptations for mate choice because attractive traits signal important aspects of mate quality, such as health and fertility.

From an evolutionary standpoint, fuller faces indicate heart health and immunity to infections. So, to some degree, we are programmed to be more attracted to certain faces over others. Sexual dimorphism, a fancy term for sex-specific traits, is one of the major factors in determining what we find beautiful. The more feminine a woman’s features are, the more attractive she’s perceived to be through a male set of eyes. For women, things like large eyes, a small nose and fuller lips are generally found to be more attractive since they are considered to enhance facial femininity.

Take home message at this point is: if you don’t look like Angelina Jolie it doesn’t mean you’re out of luck. It’s important to note that it’s less about your specific features than it is about the overall face. In other words, as long as your features collectively feminize your face (even if you have a larger nose or thinner lips, for instance), you’re still considered pretty in a male visual cortex. If high cheekbones contribute to greater femininity, then the total look would be perceived to be attractive. Not necessarily just the high cheekbones on their own.

The overall face and the proportion of features compared to each other give a face an attractive advantage over others. Aesthetic doctors use this fact, while they remodel faces using surgical or non-surgical treatments.

The perceptions of beauty also differ from one cultural to another and also across timelines (old time period to modern times). Like these days among Caucasians model-skinny or angular faces are considered ideal. While in Asian and Arab cultures more fuller and contoured faces are considered attractive, which used to be popular in older times in Caucasian societies as depicted by renaissance literature and art.

A study done at St. Andrews University few years back showed that facial adiposity, or the perception of weight in the face, was actually rated as more attractive to men. From an evolutionary standpoint, fuller faces indicate agreeable cardiovascular health and immunity to other infections. Good health equals healthy babies. At least that may have been our ancestors’ unconscious reasoning. Symmetry and average-ness are also equally important when it comes to perceptions of beauty. Believe it or not, being average is cool. Both appear to indicate high variations in individual proteins, which lead to fewer birth defects in offspring.

Cognitive researchers Dr. Kang Lee and Dr. Pam Pallett published a study in 2010 that attempted at explaining the key factors that determine how attractive a woman’s face may appear to others. According to their research the distance between a woman’s eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth holds the key to her attractiveness. They also suggested in the study that keys to attractiveness include facial ratio, alluring features, symmetry and average-ness.

Facial Symmetry is considered beautiful because it rules out a history of poor developmental stability early on —for example, a major illness or a nutrition deficiency (which could lead to asymmetrical features). Evolutionary psychologists believe humans have evolved to find healthy facial features attractive, and symmetrical facial features are a good indication of health. Anti aging research has shown that as we grow older the asymmetry of the face becomes exaggerated, hence asymmetry is linked with aging and fading beauty.

Facial Features Average-ness Another reason you might be considered attractive is because you’re familiar. In a study at Brandeis University, there was a higher rate of agreement among close friends, siblings and spouses on what they considered attractive among strangers, suggesting that attractiveness has a strong social component, too. People who have already formed romantic relationships idealize their partner’s facial features, so they actually perceive them to be more physically attractive than other people would. These days movies and media also have a strong influence on what we perceive as beautiful. Like in certain societies big lips are considered a mark of beauty, while in other cultures high cheek-bones and chiseled jaw-line is considered more beautiful compared to a more chubby and rounded face.

Aging & Beauty

As we age all layers of our face under go changes. Skin looses collagen and elastin, which makes face look tired, dehydrated and wrinkled. Fat compartments under the skin begin to loose volume. These changes happen much earlier in the mobile areas of face like mid-cheeks and under the eye area compared to the sides of the face. As a result face does not age uniformly, mid-face volume loss leads to deep smile lines, drooping of corners of mouth and hanging jowls. Bones, which provide the solid foundation for all soft tissue layers of our face, also loose volume over time. Maximum change is seen in the glabellar (forehead), maxillary (center of face and upper lip area), lateral projection of zygoma (cheeks) and mandible (jawline) areas due to bone loss with aging. More bone loss in certain regions of face contributes to the further asymmetry of face as we age. When we gaze upon a young face our attention is drawn to eyes and lips, which is hallmarked as the triangle of youth. In contrast when we inspect an older face, our attention is caught by the drooping jawline and hollowing of mid-face, which looks like as if the triangle of youth has been inverted.

Aesthetic Treatments: Working in partnership with an aesthetic doctor you can restore, as well as enhance the golden proportions and symmetry of face with injectable soft tissue implants and neurotoxins. No facial treatment can be deliver aesthetically pleasant results if the person doing the treatment does noy understand the basics of Beauty and youthfulness. So while selecting your doctor you have to remember — Can any doctor inject beauty into your face? Answer is not really, only aesthetically inclined doctors that study beauty and understand the golden proportions of a beautiful face can artistically elevate an ordinary face into a much sought after beauty.

Looking At Skin:

A luminous, unblemished complexion is a strong factor to contribute towards attractiveness. Studies suggest there are mainly two reasons for that: Flawless skin indicates good health and youth. Smooth and relatively hairless skin indicates low levels of androgens and high estrogen. Both indicate fertility. What’s more, skin free of acne and other dermatological issues is perceived to carry healthy genes (hence, greater chances of producing healthy babies). A study published in the journal of European academy of dermatology and venereology in 2007, suggested that the skin topography indicates youth and color distribution indicates health of a person. Hence these two factors make skin look attractive and alluring — so get on the good side of your dermatologist.

Aesthetic Treatments: Injectable soft tissue fillers or fat can be used to bring proportion back to face compensating the loss of volume with age or to recreate the genetically blessed proportions of beauty.

By working on your skin with a dermatologist you can achieve clear, healthy and youthfully radiant skin. Treatments that stimulate production of new, non-fragmented collagen provide substantial improvement to the appearance and health of aged skin. These treatments along with improving the skin hydration with non-crosslinked hyaluronic acid can elevate skin from being ordinary to full of life radiant.

Smile You Got Dimples

A smile empowered with dimples can add attraction and cuteness to any face that’s why dimples have always been seen as symbols of beauty. It seems silver screen and media world has also been cast under the spell of dimples by just looking at how many celebs have dimples.

Dimples can adorn a face boosting up the appeal of the cheeks or chin, although the chin dimples are more rare than cheeks. Beauty decoded by science shows that dimples are inherited as an irregular autosomal dominant trait. Which in layman’s terms means: if both your parents have dimples you have a great probability of inheriting them, but this does not guarantee that you will get these cute facial dents for sure.  

Fun Science fact: Genetic research places the cleft chin dimple on chromosome 5 and cheek dimples on chromosome 16, with a variable penetrance.

Looking At The Anatomy Of Dimples

Structurally speaking dimples are a facial muscle deformity. Where as the chin dimple is a result of an underlying bony defect. Both happen to be envious and popular deformities that are requested by many cosmetic surgery patients.

There are two different theories that attempt to explain how cheek dimples form. First one states that theses cute divots form as a result of shorter muscles around the mouth. The second and more popular theory describes dimples as a defect in the facial muscle going by the brilliant name of Zygomaticus Major. This large muscle covers the side of the cheeks, and dimples are believed to form when there is a divide in this muscle; which is normally all in one piece. The skin in the region of the double or bifid Zygomaticus Major muscle is inserted onto the inferior bundle of the muscle fibers. Smiling makes the overlying skin draw inward and the dimple grows deeper, thereby making it more visible.

Dimples can be transient or permanent, depending on the cause or factor responsible for their occurrence. Excessive fat deposition, which disappears with the aging process, some times causes transient dimples. The stretching or lengthening of muscles during aging process can also lead to gradual obliteration of this facial feature. This explains why some dimples are more common and conspicuous in younger age groups.

Dimple Surgery

Dimples can be created surgically as a minor procedure done under local anesthesia. Most of the techniques, if not all, involve adherence of the buccinator muscles of the face to the dermis of the skin. This can be achieved with sutures inserted through the skin or by an open technique that is performed through the mouth, which has added bonus of avoiding any surface scarring. Like natural dimples, dimples created surgically typically appear with smiling, although surgically created dimples may be visible most of the time depending on the surgical technique used. The dimple may be present even without smiling for the first several days, or even weeks, after surgery; eventually, the surgically created dimple will most likely be present with smiling as scar develops between the inner skin and the buccinator muscle

Positioning Of The Dimples

While surgically creating a dimple, the ideal location should be the area where a less obvious faint dimple is present with smiling; thus the pre-existing dimple is made more prominent. If one cheek has a dimple, the ideal location for the other dimple can be marked at the corresponding site that would create symmetry of the face.

If a pre-existing dimple is not present, the ideal location reported by Boo-Chai is: the intersection between a horizontal line from the corner of the mouth and a vertical line from the lateral canthus of the eye. Some doctors choose a point 1.5 to 2 cm superior to a point bisecting an angle formed by the projection of the lateral commissure of lips and the lateral canthus of eye. Another landmark to correctly position the dimple can be established by asking the patient to create a negative suction and suck the cheeks inside. The site of the maximum depression can be the marked site of the dimple. The marking should be migrated slightly laterally if pulsation of Facial artery is palpable at the marked point to avoid hematoma.  The final position to do surgery is usually chosen by the patient based on preference and keeping in mind the vector of smile.

Technique

Surgical techniques can be categorized into 2 major categories, namely blind coring and open approach.

The patient’s face and mouth are prepared, and local anesthesia is administered, along the marked area. Hypodermic needles are then passed through the marked point into the buccal mucosa. A soft tissue trephine bur connected to a latch-type handpiece or a punch biopsy needle is used to punch the buccal mucosa while the opposite hand pushes the buccal mucosa inward and supports this area externally. The soft tissue cylindrical fragment (consisting of the mucosa, a small portion of the buccinator muscle, and a part of the Bichat fat pad) is removed with scissors, and the skin is kept intact. Alternatively you could incise the mucosa and under direct vision excise a small part of muscle and fat. The advantage of open approach is the depth and size of dimple can be adjusted based on the amount of fat present. For more depth of dimple more fat can be excised and a larger defect in muscle should be created.

Defect closure is performed by placing a non-absorbable or absorbable suture through the cheek mucosa, muscle, and Bichat fat pad on 1 side of the defect; then through the dermis layer of the skin; and finally through the Bichat fat pad, the buccinator muscle, and the mucosa on the other side of the defect. The knot is tied and tension adjusted based on the depth of dimple required. The patient is advised to maintain good oral hygiene with chlorhexidine mouth wash and oral antibiotics. Analgesics are prescribed to keep the patient comfortable and pain free. Suture removal is done in non-absorbable sutures at 10-14 days.

Potential Complications Of Dimple Surgery

·      Sudden disappearance of the dimple,

·      Asymmetry,

·      Foreign body reaction,

·      Bleeding, and

·      Injury to a nerve (buccal branch of the facial nerve)

·      Injury to the salivary gland duct (Stensen duct)

All these potential side effects can present themselves during the surgery, but in experienced hands the chance of them happening is not very common.

Tips & Tricks To Improve Surgical Outcomes

·      The non-excision suture techniques do not provide long lasting results. Removing the part of the muscle and fat delivers more long lasting and

·      Location of dimple must be chosen based on vector of smile. Blindly following the intersection of oral commissure and lateral canthus may place dimples too inferiorly.

·      For bulky cheeks choosing an open approach with excision of adequate amount of fat to create a deeper dimple rather than a core excision and single stitch delivers better results.

·      Prolene sutures for muscle to dermis approximation causes long lasting results but increase chances of foreign body reaction and infection. Alternatively Polydiaxone suture can be used and mucosa closed with catgut.

·      Always explain to the patient that the dimple will be exaggerated in first few weeks and will be present even at rest and over time only on animation.

There you have it the nitty gritty and the surgical journey through the whole process of creation of cuteness factor called: dimples. Happy Valentines Day!!