Unsightly spider veins can make you feel shy or uncomfortable in your own skin. These blue, purple, or red lines most often appear on your legs and ankles, but they can also show up on your face and other noticeable areas.
At Wrinkle Fairy with offices across the Greater Chicago area, our aesthetic specialist, Leslie Forrester, APRN, offers effective treatment for pesky spider veins. Here’s a closer look at two popular spider vein therapies and how to know which one is best for you.
Your veins and capillaries have tiny one-way valves that help keep blood flowing in the right direction. If one of these valves wears out or gets stuck, blood pools in the vein. This can make a normally invisible vein show through your skin as a purple, blue, or reddish-pink line or spot.
These pesky veins most often appear on your legs, ankles, feet, and face—but they can show up nearly anywhere. Though spider veins aren’t a health threat, their unsightly appearance can have a negative impact on your confidence and quality of life.
Anyone can get spider veins, but some factors and conditions increase your risk of developing them, including:
The good news is that effective treatments for spider veins exist. Your Wrinkle Fairy provider evaluates your skin and history to recommend the best spider vein treatment for you.
Although sun exposure is a risk factor for spider veins and other skin problems, like age spots, fine lines, and wrinkles, another type of light can improve the appearance and health of your skin: intense pulsed light (IPL).
IPL uses different wavelengths of light to penetrate the tissues below the surface of your skin that directly target the red pigments in the broken capillaries and veins. This causes the vein walls to collapse.
Over time, your body reabsorbs the treated veins and your skin clears. As an added bonus, IPL treatments may help improve your skin in other ways, including shrinking large pores, smoothing fine lines, minimizing mild brown spots and other sun damage, and improving skin texture.
Not all spider veins respond well to IPL treatments. Here’s a look at when IPL might be right for you:
Keep in mind that these are general guidelines. Everyone is different, so be sure to ask your Wrinkle Fairy provider if IPL is right for your spider veins.
Laser therapy for spider veins, also called laser ablation, is a noninvasive therapy that treats spider veins by directing heat energy into the targeted vein. As with IPL treatments, this causes the vein to collapse and eventually get absorbed by your body.
But unlike IPL treatments, laser therapy can address deeper veins that develop below the surface of your skin. Laser therapy may also be used on other parts of the body besides the face, like the ankles.
Depending on the severity of your spider veins, you may need more than one session to meet your aesthetic goals. Your Wrinkle Fairy provider assesses your skin and recommends the right number of sessions for you.
Since the treatment stimulates your body’s collagen production, in addition to minimizing the appearance of your spider veins and capillaries, it can also resurface your skin, minimizing other age-related issues like loose skin, hyperpigmentation, acne scars, and more.
According to the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery (ASDS), laser therapy is the treatment of choice for spider veins that appear on your face. This includes:
Learn more about how we can help you say goodbye to spider veins by scheduling a consultation with Leslie at the Wrinkle Fairy location nearest you in Chicago, Oakbrook Terrace, Arlington Heights, or Naperville, Illinois.
