Getting Rid of Stretch Marks

Stretch marks are exactly what they sound like, they are stretching of the skin. They usually appear as indented streaks that can be purple, red, white or silvery colour.  They most commonly occur appear on the breast, hips, buttocks or any other places of the body. They are often common on the stomach after pregnancy. They don’t hurt you, but many people do not like the way that they look. 

What do Stretch Marks Look Like?

Stretch marks do not all look alike. It can depend on how long you have had them, where on the body they are located and how quickly the skin has stretched. They can range anything from indented streaks or coloured lines that can be pink, red, black, blue or purple streaks. As stretch marks age, they tend to fade to lighter colours, even to white and sometimes disappear completely. Unfortunately, most of the time stretch marks are permanent.  Having treatments for your stretch marks unfortunately won’t make them disappear but will greatly reduce their appearance.

How do they occur?

Stretch marks often occur with pregnancy or after a sudden change in weight or size. We most commonly think of pregnancy or extreme weight gain as the culprits but often we also see them on bodybuilders or people who change the shape of their bodies quickly, such as having a growth spurt in your youth.

What influences whether you get stretch marks or not is your genetics, how quickly the tissue is stretched, how much cortisol is in your system (cortisol is a hormone produced by your adrenal glands at high levels and makes the skin lose its elasticity and makes it more prone to developing stretch marks).  Cortisol creams lotions and pills can also decrease the skin’s ability to stretch thus your increased risk of developing stretch marks. You have an increased risk of developing stretch marks if – you are a woman, you are white-skinned, you have a family history of stretch marks, you have had a pregnancy, you have a history of delivering large babies or twins, you are overweight, having dramatic weight loss or gain or are using corticosteroid medication

How can we reduce them?

So now we know how they are caused, how do we get rid of stretch marks? Removing stretch marks is not an easy process but never fear, at U Skin Clinics, we have many treatments that can assist in reducing them and making them less noticeable. 

The treatments aim to damage some of the stretchmark tissue in a controlled manner and stimulate your body to replace that tissue with healthy tissue. The treatments we have available include: 

Fractionated Laser 

The 1540 fractionated laser we have at U Skin Clinics was the first laser in the world to be FDA approved for the treatment of stretch marks. This laser uses fractionated therapy which means the laser is applied in dots therefore it only damages about 20% of the tissue at any one time. This gives the body time to repair. If we were to damage 100% of the tissue the body will go into repair mode and lay down scar tissue but because it is only a percentage of the skin it will heal it slowly and replace the damaged tissue with healthy tissue.

Skin Needling 

Skin needling works in a remarkably similar way, but we use an exceptionally fine needle to do the damage. It is attached to a gun like a tattoo gun. The advantage of skin needling is we can infuse serums into the skin to aid with healing.

Vascular Laser or IPL  

If there is redness in a stretch mark, we can use Ipl or a vascular laser to assist with this

Plasma Therapy 

This is using a different form of energy, plasma energy. This treatment is deeper than the other two but is great for more stubborn stretch marks. 

Stretch Mark Removal Aftercare

We can also use skincare during the healing process to improve the results. 

Unfortunately, most stretch marks are permanent but we can definitely make them appear better and less noticeable, if the stretch mark has faded to white cosmetic tattooing can sometimes assist bring the colour back to a more flesh appearance.