What Is a Lunchtime Chemical Peel Like?

Hello, hello, hello. We have this lovely woman with us who I'm going to do a chemical peel on. Now, just a little bit of my background. I have done deep chemical peels. We're talking Baker-Gordon, Hetter, phenol 88 percent. Those people have to be asleep. You cannot do it with somebody awake. And those peels were incredible. They would, like, slough off your skin. It was transformative, but you had to be under general anesthesia. Downtime was incredible. At least 10 days of just oozing, crusting, terrible, and then you're red for months afterwards.

We're doing a lunchtime peel, and typically [our medical aesthetician] is the one that does it, but I kind of had this discussion, I've known her for years, and I said, you know what, I'm happy to do it for her. So I am going to be doing her lunchtime peel, and I want you to check that out. Now, if you come in and get it by [our master aesthetician], what ends up happening is you get a lot more. You get the pampering, right? So I'm not trying to say come for your lunchtime peels to me. But if you wanted to get one and we're doing injections and stuff, I'm happy to do it.

All right, rules of thumb with chemical peels. Never pass the chemical peel over somebody's face. So, do not pass an acid over somebody's face. You want to basically be holding the material away from their face. You don't want to ever drip in their eyes. Chin is up. They're laying flat and comfortable. It doesn't matter how you do it. You just have to have a system, starting from the chin, starting from one side. You do a layer, you wait, you probably do a second layer. It depends on the peel, but just be methodical so that you're not missing spots. When you are dipping your sponge in your peel, make sure it's not soaking wet, because we don't want it to drip into the eyes.

Now, also be cognizant, it depends on the peel. Some peels, like a Jessner's or a TCA, as you go, it starts to frost. You start to get, like, a little white reaction that happens. With some peels that happens immediately. With a peel like a phenol peel, as soon as you put it on, it frosts. So you have to be aware of it. If you think that it should be an immediate frost and it's a delayed frost, then you keep adding and adding and adding, and then all of a sudden, 20, 30 minutes later, you're really kind of frosted. You overdid it. So these are important things to know about the peel you're using.

How are you tolerating this? Good. There will be times where it starts to sting a little bit more. Very slightly. It's going to be a little bit spicy. Now, when the sponge is not wet, I've done a zone, I've done an area, what I do is I do a light treatment to the brow upper lid junction. I'll even do the lower lids. Believe it or not, the eyes actually can tolerate a very deep peel. You can do the deepest peel around the eyes, whereas you cannot do it to the neck. So we can do phenol peels around the eyes. Certainly a lunchtime peel like a VI Peel, this is a VI Precision Peel, you can definitely do around the eyes, but you have to be aware of where you are.

Now, going down again, feathering it into the hairline. Look at where my left hand is the whole time. It is not over the patient's face. It's not over her eyes. So I have her put her lips together so I can do the perioral area. She's holding her breath a little bit sometimes, because it can be spicy around the nose. For most peels, you can go a few fingerbreadths under the neck, typically. It's the submental region, but you don't want to go down here most of the time. So I check to make sure everything is fairly symmetric. I'll send it into the hair, into the ears. Perfect. All right, I'm going to give it a second.

All right, somebody asked me a question about peels. What's your question about peels? How long is recovery? Good question. It depends on the peel. So a lunchtime peel, like a VI Peel, you'll be orange, and I tell people you'll smell like you went to a gross anatomy lab in medical school. You smell like formaldehyde. So that's the downtime, and then it depends on your skin quality. If you've been doing really good skin care for many years, you're barely going to peel. You're not going to peel, you're just going to have a little redness. But if there is quite a bit of keratin sitting there, you're going to see a nice aggressive peel. It's important not to pick at it. It's important not to try to peel it off like a sunburn. But typically it's about five days or so with this type of peel.

And when do you see results? Well, right about a week or so, around when it kind of heals off. You can get darker in the beginning as it's doing its thing. The dead cells, the dead keratin, get darker, so people get worried about what is this. And the same thing can happen with lasers. If you do a laser, you can have patches of darkness, and those dead cells need to come up. Look how I pass it. I'm not passing over her eyes at all.

How often can one do this? So, you know, with any kind of skin treatment, whether it's microneedling, Morpheus, any type of BBL, this type of stuff, you can do it about three times a year if you wanted to. You can do it even more if you wanted to. Most of the time you don't need to do it more than that. I think three times a year would be plenty, especially if you're combining with other stuff, if you're doing microneedling, if you're doing some other treatments, if you're doing some IPL, BBL treatments. But as far as this type of peel, I think three times a year is plenty.

So we used the whole peel. It's all done. How do you feel? A little stingy, but not terrible. So when I sit her up, you can kind of see the face looks a little more orange. Do you smell it? It's not a bad smell, it's just like a chemical smell. What I tell people is, don't use your fancy pillowcases for the next few days. You don't want to get this stuff on your clothes or your beautiful Egyptian cotton pillowcase. But that's pretty much it.

Now again, typically [our aesthetician] does all these peels. She's fantastic. This took us a few minutes. It's in, it's out. When you come and see her, she'll spend like an hour, she'll do an amazing treatment, she may do a facial with her beforehand. So make an appointment, come see us, okay?