One of the signs of aging is sagging skin around the face and neck. While the sagging is in its early mild to moderate stage, laser skin tightening can help you to achieve smoother and tighter skin without undergoing surgical face lift, which is considerably more expensive and traumatic.

This is achieved by using non-ablative lasers, which do not remove any layers of skin from the surface. Because the epidermis is intact, there is no prolonged downtime, or the associated risks of complications from healing. It can be performed almost anywhere on the body: face, neck, abdomen, arms, legs, and buttocks.

These lasers are mainly in the near or mid infrared range, at 1064nm, 1320nm and 1450nm. They penetrate deep into the dermis, and are absorbed primarily by water content. This heats up the dermis and causes a controlled damage to the other contents, with subsequent regeneration and remodeling of new collagen and tissue, and skin tightening. This thermal damage is limited to the dermis by cooling the epidermis during the treatment

They have been demonstrated to induce new collagen formation in the papillary dermis, tighten skin, and improve skin texture and tone. Although the improvement typically seen is relatively modest comparing to laser skin resurfacing, it is compensated by the minimal risk and downtime. If you have severely sun-damaged skin and skin laxity, you would benefit more from more aggressive treatment such as fractional CO2 laser resurfacing above, but bear in mind that you would have a longer downtime too.

Because of the deeper penetration and heating effect on skin, they tend to cause a fair amount of pain during treatment, and it is necessary to apply local anaesthetic cream for an hour before treatment.

Further skin tightening occurs over the next few months after treatment, but optimal results usually require 4 - 6 treatments at a month apart. The exact treatment protocols, such as the parameters, number of treatments needed, and the interval between treatments, vary among the many different lasers in this category. The long pulsed Nd:YAG lasers provide particular benefits. One of the better- known and researched lasers is Gentle YAG laser, which is a long pulsed Nd-YAG laser with a wavelength of 1064nm.