“Cellulite has classically been one of the biggest challenges for cosmetic surgeons,” says Manhattan dermatologist Anne Chapas, M.D., as we sit in her spotless office at UnionDerm, a gleaming white box overlooking Union Square. For years, she tells me, the best options were Cellulaze, a thin laser fiber that both liquefies fat and cuts fibrous bands, and Cellfina, a—yikes!—rapidly vibrating microblade that physically slices the band causing the dimple. Both need to penetrate the skin, requiring anesthesia and sometimes weeks of recovery.
So it’s not surprising to see Chapas get visibly excited when she talks about QWO, an injectable enzyme called collagenase that is able to break down the tough collagen buildup in septae with minimal recovery and results that last for years. Originally formulated to release tight collagen in medical conditions, it’s been cleared by the FDA for buttocks, but Chapas and other doctors have been using it off-label for thighs too. “We mark the spots, no numbing, zap zap zap, straight into the dimple, you’re done,” she says, noting that the main downside is, often, painless bruising, “so you can’t be in a bathing suit the next week.” Treatments cost $1,000, and on average it takes three sessions to see results.
Slipping into another paper thong, I pose awkwardly as Chapas scrutinizes my derriere’s moonscape. “Could you clench your bottom to show the dimples better?” she asks, matter-of-factly, before revealing that QWO could vanquish much of them. As I have some skin laxity, I’m also a candidate for Morpheus8, a device that pairs deep radio frequency with microneedling—the first to penetrate a full eight millimeters. While the $2,500 procedure requires an injected anesthetic, it achieves the heretofore-elusive trifecta of reducing cellulite and fat while tightening skin. Emtone, which Upper East Side plastic surgeon Darren Smith, M.D., prefers for “wavy cellulite” like the kind he notices on the backs of my thighs, is another option I could consider, he tells me. Using a breakthrough combination of collagen- and elastin-building thermal radio frequency and band-loosening, circulation-improving mechanical shockwave therapy, Emtone generally requires maintenance every four months, “kind of the same as Botox,” explains Smith.
But it’s Yoon-Soo Cindy Bae, M.D., who sells me on the promise of Resonic. Using first-of-its-kind Rapid Acoustic Pulse technology, Resonic deploys ultra-high-frequency sound waves to disrupt stiff, fibrotic tissue without breaking the skin. After a single hour-long session, starting at around $2,500, cellulite is gone and you’re able to return to daily activity immediately.
The idea of anything permanent gives me immediate pause, especially after Linda Evangelista’s bombshell allegations that a popular fat-freezing procedure left her “brutally disfigured” by a condition called paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH). “PAH is truly a rare complication of cryolipolysis, and hasn’t been, to my knowledge, described in Resonic—which is a fundamentally different procedure,” Bohdan Pomahac, M.D., division chief of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Yale Medicine, tells me. But because researchers don’t know precisely how cellulite develops, there is also a lack of well-designed clinical trials that would objectively assess whether a particular technology actually works. “No one would argue that liposuction doesn’t work, because it’s very easy to demonstrate. It’s a lot harder to demonstrate results of some lasers and the like,” Pomahac explains, adding that the placebo effect can be an important factor with these types of treatments too. “Resonic may work,” he says, “or it may make no difference at all.”
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
