Acne scars

[teacup]

Hello,

Is there anything that will be effective for removing acne scars or are some acne scars permanent?

[DrYechiel]

Hello Teacup,

Scars are a fascinating phenomenon. Damaged by injury or infection, the body responds by replacing the damaged tissue with tissue that is densely knitted-together, harder to damage than the tissue it replaced. Because it is constructed differently than undamaged tissue (rapidly, as an emergency repair rather than slowly, through ordinary growth), scar tissue has a different appearance: on skin, scars tend to be hairless and sometimes have a different color (sometimes lighter and unable to tan, sometimes darker and unable to fade) as well as a different texture and flexibility than surrounding skin.

Many scars can be made to look better and made less noticeable over time. However, success is more likely for small, recent scars than for large scars that have been long established.

Acne scars are mostly small scars but sometimes they leave larger scars due to complications (such as infection spread by scratching the acne area during its inflammatory stage). There are two types of scars: bulging (above the skin surface) and depressed (below the skin surface). They can be treated somewhat differently but there is a lot in common between them as well regarding the way they can be treated. I will emphasize a uniform method of improving the way both scar types look.

There are two basic steps to improving the appearance of scars:
1. Gradually remove the top layers of scar tissue.
2. Shrink the borders of the scar so that the normal surrounding skin invades the area previously occupied by the scar tissue and takes it over.

A more tricky method can be to induce replacement of scar tissue by normal skin but that is a complex and not well-defined procedure and may need many years before it can be practical.

You can use a gentle peel to remove the top layers of scar tissue. Be careful not to use strong peels because they may remove live layers from your skin and cause injury (and a worse-looking scar). The peel will make the scar area look less different from the surrounding skin and will induce new skin to come out faster. In the process, normal skin cells will have a better chance to compete on the former scar area at the scar/skin border line. The complementary step is to use a product which can induce more normal-looking skin to develop. This should be a product which also has a tightening effect on skin so that the scar area will look as if it is “squeezed” and gradually the normal-looking skin will appear to take over the scar area. A topical high in Vitamin C can be useful for this step: Vitamin C is also used in medicinal treatments to induce collagen-building in skin and make it stronger and more elastic-looking.

We have two products which can help you in this regard, NanoFibrin and Giga-C, which can be alternated to provide great results. Giga-C is 20% Vitamin C and has a very strong tightening effect on skin which makes the skin look more smooth and elastic.

For large scars, you may need a minor surgical procedure which will remove the scar tissue and stitch together the edges of the surrounding tissue so that they can heal again with almost invisible scarring.

Thank you for your question.