Noticing the Ghost of Summers Past on Your Skin?

Let’s get real about how much sunscreen we’ve been using our entire lives. For those of us who are past their thirties, constant skincare probably wasn’t consistent during our teens and twenties. In fact, if you were an ’80s kid, you lathered on the suntan oil to get that rich, summery tan that was trending at the time.

Maybe after a few years, you ended up spending most of your time indoors, managing college and then a career in one of the Bay Areas shady, modern buildings. When you finally had time to spend in the sun again, you slathered on sunscreen. But the truth is, the damage was already done. And good skincare habits are great, but you’ll still notice the ghost of summer’s past appear on your face and body.

No amount of over-the-counter skincare is going to completely erase the time you spent sun worshipping years ago. You will still watch freckles morph into darker age spots while other areas turn pigmented shades of white. One reason we notice the real damage from sun exposure decades later is due to the aging process itself. Our skin naturally becomes less elastic, providing an opportunity for lifetime UV damage to appear. Broken capillaries, aka spider veins, surface. Wrinkles become deeper due to less collagen activity and so on. It’s why locals from San Mateo and Burlingame come to our skin care clinic. They’ve tried to make up for their sun-worshipping habits by spending the last decade under sun hats and using SPF 50 products, but the old wounds from their younger years aren’t healing.

The 80’s were radical, and so was the tanning.

Anyone who lived in the 1980s might remember the popular oil-and-lemon recipe for a great tan. You baked in the backyard with lemon juice in your hair to get that sun-streaked blond. And your body was slipping around the plastic lounger from the coconut-scented tanning oil. Or maybe you were a ’90s kid who followed the same free-and-easy philosophy with your skin. Today, you live in Burlingame or San Mateo and are regretting the devil-may-care attitude of your youth. UV protection is now an essential habit, but it hasn’t cleared up the sun-damaged skin. As a leading skin care clinic in the Bay Area, we get it. And unlike the skincare of yore, modern technology gives post-sunbathers a second chance.

Sun damage, or photoaging, affects several layers beneath the skin. It’s why the true impact of our sun-worshipping days haunts us many years later. And also why an over-the-counter topical cream isn’t going to completely disappear the dark spots and wrinkles. But a laser skin treatment goes as deep as the damage to address it from the foundation. Laser skin treatments stimulate collagen production, allowing newer, fresher skin to rise to the surface.

Yale Medicine posted a piece on the details around photoaging. And when the article lists solutions for sun-damaged skin, lasers are at the top. But if you are interested in other solutions, our skin care clinic team are here to share all the options available. If you live in or around neighborhoods in Burlingame and San Mateo, our skin care clinic is a short drive away. We are ready to address your skincare concerns and help purge the ghosts of summer’s past.