dark spots on chest
Illustration by Oana Cazan

Is Your Chest Making You Look Older than You Are?

How lasers and injections turned the clock back on my décolleté

In our I Tried It series, columnist Leah Rumack test-drives the latest and buzziest cosmetic procedures. This time around, she strives to youthify her décolleté.

I’m obsessed with my friend’s bosom. A lifelong beauty fanatic with a serious dedication to sunscreen, her décolleté is as creamy and unmarked as that of a newborn baby fawn even though she’s well into her 40s.  My neck, on the other hand, is ringed with fine “necklace” lines, and my chest is speckled, red and starting to wrinkle from a lifetime of sun damage. I’m fair-skinned and have long been religious about year-round sunscreen and every manner of lotion and potion on my face, but I’ve barely paid any attention to my décolleté. Now, it seems, the jig is up.

I go see Diane Wong, the medical director at Glow Medi Spa in Toronto, to see what can be done to restore my bosom’s grandeur.

“When people ask me to guess how old they are I always look at their décolleté,” Wong confesses. She glances at my mottled chest and pronounces cheerfully, “You’re going to be getting that leathery skin unless you do something.”

We settle on a three-part plan. I’m going to have three sessions of intense pulsed laser (IPL) to treat the hyperpigmentation and boost the collagen on my chest ($475 per treatment). These will be interspersed with two sessions of Restylane Skinboosters, which are micro injections of hyaluronic acid into the lines around my neck ($700 each). The cherry on top at the end: one fat-zapping Sculpsure session ($1,500) to melt away my double chin.

I start with the IPL. My trusty medical aesthetician Catherine Lu guides a gadget that looks like a vertical stapler across my chest, zapping as she goes. It feels like a mean elastic is being slapped against my skin repeatedly, but it’s tolerable. Afterwards, the pigment—an almost perfect V that spreads across my collarbone and down into my cleavage—rises to the surface (I can see it the first night) and flakes off over the next couple of weeks. For three days, I’m not allowed to do anything that generates heat, like going in a sauna or working out (so sad!). Since the area is extra exposed to damage from the sun, I need to be super vigilant about applying sunscreen to my chest and limiting my time in the sun for at least a month.

“When people ask me to guess how old they are I always look at their décolleté. You’re going to be getting that leathery skin unless you do something,” says Dr. Wong  

Next, it’s time for the Skinboosters. While the idea of getting injections directly into my throat feels, I don’t know, horrifying, the combination of letting a numbing cream soak in for an hour beforehand and the tool that nurse Alex Do uses—which isn’t a huge scary needle but rather a specialized device with tiny needles so the product is delivered just under the skin—mean that I’m fretting for nothing. I end up with a clothesline of small red pinpricks across my neck and I develop several bruises that take a few days to go away, but it doesn’t hurt that much. I get up and gaze at myself in the mirror.  I can see the plumping effect immediately—the lines are nowhere to be seen.  

A month after my first IPL treatment, I’m back for more. Lu and I look at my “before” photographs and I can already see an improvement in the amount of redness and brown spots I have. A few weeks later, it’s time for round two of the Skinboosters top-up. The appointment is the same as before, but afterwards I develop little nodules in the days immediately following at some of the injection spots that are a bit sore. Do had warned me that this could happen, and all I have to do is massage the product in a bit.

The final step is one more IPL treatment and Sculpsure for my “submental fat,” i.e., my double chin (I have a bit left even though I treated it with Belkyra injections a couple years ago).  I’ve had Sculpsure before and it doesn’t tickle, but since medical clinics can give you laughing gas to deal with the discomfort, I’m willing to try again. The treatment is an intense 25 minutes, but the heat cycles on and off every five seconds, so you get breaks. Do straps me into a hilarious helmet contraption that makes me look like an extra from Return of the Jedi. I’m allowed to have two hits of gas throughout, the effects of which last for about five minutes. “Ready?” she says (Is she smiling? She’s smiling!) and then flips the switch. The bit under my chin heats up to the QUITE HOT level, but with the combination of the gas, the short intervals and a stack of magazines, I’m able to get through. I’m sore but not visibly swollen for a week after. I won’t see the full effects of the treatment for at least eight weeks, when my lymphatic system has had a chance to flush the torched fat cells.

My décolleté, on the other hand, is well on its way to creamy goddess status, though Glow Medi Spa usually recommends up to six IPL sessions for a previously untreated area, and I do think I’d need more than the three treatments I had to really get rid of every last bit of the spotting. My neck, however, is as smooth as a swan’s. I’ll take it!

 

    More from I Tried It