For years, I've been trying to caution my daughter Marissa about tanning beds.
I know they aren't safe. I've read the stories, seen the literature.
It always seems senseless to me to expose your skin to UV rays at least without the other benefits of sunbathing -- the swim-up bar, the lapping ocean or a championship golf course.
My generation didn't listen, either. We slathered baby oil on our backs, we exposed fish belly white skin to the elements -- all towards chasing that perfect tan. I played club tennis for years without sunscreen and even got sun poisoning in Cuba when I was 18.
Who was I to tell my daughter, the girl with skin so porcelain, she could have been a cast regular on Downton Abbey, that sun worshipping was a bad idea?
Well, thanks to Dr. Antoniak's Visia skin analysis machine, Marissa got her wake-up call.
Visia is a tool that doctors use to identify the good, the bad and the ugly of a patient's face by analyzing all elements of the skin: the size of pores, sun damage, texture, bacteria, rosacea and wrinkles. It compares your skin to 99 other women, of your age, to give you a baseline from which the doctor develops a personalized skin strategy using products and interventions that give you the best result.
As part of our treatment plans, Marissa and I both took the Visia test and the results were revealing.
I'd been given the Visia analysis three years ago and I tested badly in many areas. Since then I've taken measures to improve my skin, such as avoiding the sun and adjusting my lifestyle so my results were less shocking. Compared to other women my age, I have better skin than more than 80 percent of them, fewer wrinkles, better texture. Still my sun damage was up there for the world to see. I had a 66% score meaning that my skin was better than slightly more than half the women analyzed.
That is not a good result, in my mind.
Marissa didn't fair nearly as well as I did. Thanks to tanning beds and early sun exposure without sunscreen (the downside of co-parenting) she scored better than only 33% compared to other women her age (24). She also had clogged pores and a high level of bacteria on her skin from not utilizing a correct cleansing technique.
Based on our Visia results, Drs. Antoniak and Bonaparte have crafted treatment plans for both of us involving the use of medical grade skin care products from Vivierskin to arrest the bacteria (Marissa) and the rosacea (Rose) and put us on a path for skin care recovery.
Using the Visia is a great first step towards getting the skin you've always dreamed about. Even if you don't have the budget for Botox and dermal fillers or chemical peels, an investment of $60 in a Visia session will show you what you need to work on. And the Vivierskin treatment (a full skin care product package for under $275) will help arrest the damage and improve your skin in just a few weeks. My rosacea, caused strangely by my new addiction to physical fitness, was gone in two weeks. My skin is now getting the cleansing and moisturizing regime it needs based on the evidence provided by the Visia. Not bad for an investment of just $400.
The real take-away for Marissa is that tanning beds are death to good skin and that using sunscreen is a must in ensuring she keeps her beautiful porcelain skin much longer than I did.
And that, as they say, is priceless!
Visia and Vivierskin: A great gift for Mom on Mother's Day!
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