How to Tighten Neck Skin Without Surgery

Today I’m gonna talk about the neck and how to tighten neck skin without surgery.

Many people start to hate their neck in their 40s and 50s and it unfortunately just gets worse after that.

So I’m gonna focus on how I can help you feel better about your neck, how can we get you to love your neck again.

We’re gonna cover technological treatments and we’re gonna cover the injections that can help you to love your neck again.

How to Tighten Neck Skin Without Surgery

Technology

ReFirme, Pelleve

Let’s start by talking about technology.

What technological treatments can you use to help you improve the appearance of the neck?

There are different levels of technology and each technological device has its pluses and it’s minuses.

Let’s start with the least invasive.

One very popular treatment is called ReFirme. It uses radio frequency energy to heat the deep skin.

The idea behind pretty much all of these technological treatments, whether they use laser or ultrasound or radiofrequency, is that we want to get heat to the deeper skin. By heating up the deeper skin, it causes the collagen to become tighter and that’s how it tightens up your skin.

The mild treatments like ReFirme, another one’s called Pelleve, are great for people who are in their 30s and 40s and they’re just noticing a little bit of looseness developing.

It’s great because it’s not painful, it’s not that expensive, it’s about three or four hundred dollars per treatment and you can get a nice tightening effect from it.

The negative behind these treatments, like ReFirme and Pelleve, is that they’re not super aggressive. If you’ve got a quite droopy neck, they’re not going to do a whole lot for you.

But if you’re in your 30s or your 40s and you’ve got some early looseness developing and you want to do something about it, then these types of treatments are definitely worth looking into.

Well, what about if that’s not enough?

Ultherapy

You can look into something a bit more aggressive but still non-invasive and probably the gold standard for non-invasive skin tightening is Ultherapy.

It utilizes ultrasound energy to target the deep skin to heat it up. Just like the ReFirme and the Pelleve. Again, the idea is you want to heat up that deep skin.

With Ultherapy you heat it up much more aggressively. Unlike Pelleve and ReFirme, there’s a bit more discomfort associated with Ultherapy. It’s definitely a bit more expensive and you can get a better result from that.

If you’re wondering what type of results can I get, take a peek at realself.com. There’s a lot of people who give their opinions of products like the Ultherapy and you can read what their results are.

What is important to realize with any of these treatments, there are people who’ve had Ultherapy and they’ve loved it and then there are people who’ve had Ultherapy and just haven’t seen what they’re hoping to see.

A lot of this really has to do with how your body, how your skin reacts to this treatment. The same deal with ReFirme. There are some people who love ReFirme, and for others it’s so-so.

That’s the negative when you’re using these technological treatments. You really are relying on the body and the body’s mechanisms to create that tightening. You’re not doing it surgically.

So if you are in the 30s or 40s and you’ve got some early looseness, ReFirme, Pelleve, those types of non-invasive, not painful treatments can really work.

For people looking for something more aggressive than that, next step up is Ultherapy. If you’re in your 50s or older and you don’t want anything invasive and you want to try to maximize the tightening, this can get you there.

Where do we go from there? The next step is invasive if you’re trying to tighten up the neck.

FaceTite

The one that is super hot is called FaceTite. It is both non-invasive and minimally invasive. I mentioned earlier that the ReFirme works by using radiofrequency on the surface of the skin to tighten it up.

FaceTite has that but it also has an internal probe that goes under the skin. So this is invasive but minimally invasive to heat the skin up from the inside as well.

That way you’ve got heating from the outside and the inside to maximize that skin tightening that you can get. But once again now you’re talking about invasive. There’s obviously some discomfort, you have to have some anesthetic just because the fact that this is somewhat invasive.

That is about what we have as far as overall tightening. You may have heard back in the day of laser liposuction used to try to tighten the skin. That was the first generation of this minimally invasive skin tightening.

The next generation was Thermy, which uses RF, and now we’re talking a lot about this FaceTite, which from what I can tell, is maybe the best we have out there with minimally invasive skin tightening.

That’s what you want to look at if you’re looking at tightening of the neck. You’ve got the non-invasive, mild, you’ve got the non-invasive, slightly more aggressive, the Ultherapy and then you’ve got the minimally invasive.

IPL

Before we get off the subject of technology, I do want to bring up something that is probably the most common technological treatment for the neck and that is IPL, intense pulse light.

One of the things that I see in my patients all the time is that patients focus on the skin of their face and they have very few age spots on their face, but come to neck and the chest, it’s a different story. Age spots are the same thing as sunspots, same thing as liver spots, these are all names for the same thing.

It’s pigmentation that develops due to sun damage and aging. IPL, intense pulse light, is the best treatment for that because it’s chemical free. There are no chemicals and anything like that. It uses light. Typically you need about four to five treatments for maximal effect, but it can really get rid of those dark spots.

So for those of you who say, look it’s not so much the looseness, but I don’t like the texture of the skin, I don’t like the color of the skin, it’s very uneven, IPL could be a huge game changer for you.

IPL is not that expensive. Maybe three or four hundred dollars per treatment, compared to thousands with some of these other treatments and it’s very well tolerated. It’s not all that painful, no downtime needed and people can get some really good changes with it.

If you haven’t anything done with your neck and you just don’t like the appearance of it, IPL often is a great option to start out with.

So that’s the technology – non-invasive, mild, non-invasive, aggressive, minimally invasive and also IPL.

How to lose fat under chin.

Injections

What about injections?

Botox

Injections are what we consider a minimally invasive treatment because you have it done with needles.

One of the things that isn’t talked about enough that can really help with the appearance of the neck is Botox.

Botox is often used in the forehead and in the crow’s feet and for the frown lines, but did you know that Botox can be a very effective way to reduce the band’s in the neck?

This is considered an off-label use, meaning it’s not necessarily FDA approved for the use of that, but a lot of plastic surgeons and dermatologists will inject Botox into thee bands of the neck to help to smooth them out.

The best candidate for that is somebody who has these vertical bands in the neck that move when they talk but their skin still is fairly tight.

If you’ve got these bands but, let’s say, you are in your 60s or in your 70s and the skin is quite loose and drooping, the Botox is not gonna do a lot for you.

But if your skin is pretty tight, pretty good, but you just got these bands that you don’t like, we usually start at 10 units of Botox for each band. We basically inject the band at about one centimeter intervals, until you use all 10 units of that. You give it a week or so and quite often those bands really smooth out and patients can see a really nice improvement in them.

That’s something that isn’t used and talked about as much as it should be because it really really does work.

Kybella

Another way to inject the neck to improve its appearance is Kybella. It is FDA-approved to reduce the fat of the double chin and it’s composed of deoxycholic acid which is a naturally occurring substance in our GI tract that emulsifies or dissolves away fat.

Now it has been isolated, it’s been purified and put into this cosmetic injection that we do into the fat of the double chin.

It works but because it literally destroys that fat, ir is a bit inflammatory. People do get some swelling afterwards and you do typically necessitate anywhere from two to four treatments for optimal effect for that Kybella.

If you have a double chin, you’ve always had that fat, especially if you’re at a good weight, your mom or dad just
gave you that double chin and you want to get rid of it and you don’t want undergo surgery, like liposuction, then no question Kybella is a very reasonable option.

The negative of Kybella is multiple treatments, you’re going to have some swelling from it, you do have to go through it and it does take a little bit of time for that swelling to come down but if you stick with it, you can get some really good changes.

Some people ask me about injecting the horizontal bands in the neck. Much of looking at your computer and looking at your phone can get you get these horizontal wrinkles of your neck. Can you inject filler into those lines to make them go away?

My experience has been not so much. Unfortunately those lines typically are quite deep, they’re quite in there and I don’t find that the filler helps all that much. You can try some other options with good skin care products with laser treatments but the fillers don’t seem to help with that.

I don’t find a whole lot of other injections that seem to help a whole lot more than doing the Kybella and the Botox. There’s no filler that you can inject the neck to tighten it up.

If, let’s say, the FaceTite is not enough, now we go towards surgery.

If you’re not looking and doing any of these treatments and you want to save money, you just want to treat at home, then there are so many things you can do with skin care products on the neck.