Pigment
Pigment Reset
Melasma and post-inflammatory pigmentation, treated as a light and inflammation problem first. Slower than a laser, and it holds longer.
- Price
- £320 a session
- Appointment
- 45 minutes
- Sessions
- Three, eight weeks apart, then reviewed
- Downtime
- Three to five days of light flaking
Three sessions typical. Topicals and sunscreen are quoted separately and cost about £70.
Melasma is the condition we most often see made worse by treatment. It responds beautifully to energy for about six weeks and then comes back darker, because the pigment was never the disease — the pigment cell’s reactivity was.
Why this is not a laser first
Under the Wood’s lamp we can usually tell how much of your pigment sits in the epidermis and how much has dropped into the dermis. Epidermal pigment lifts readily. Dermal pigment does not, and chasing it with heat inflames the melanocyte that produced it. So the first move is always to calm the cell down.
The three sessions
Each session is a low-percentage layered peel — the depth is set to your skin’s response on the day, not to a fixed protocol — with tranexamic acid and a blocking agent applied under occlusion. It is uncomfortable for about ninety seconds and then it is not.
Between sessions you are on a topical routine and a mineral SPF 50 that you will reapply, because the sun is the reason this happened and the sun is entirely indifferent to what we did in the room.
Holding it
Melasma is managed, not cured. A maintenance visit twice a year, usually in March and September, costs £160 and takes twenty minutes. The people whose results hold at three years are — without exception — the ones who kept wearing the sunscreen.