With the Northwest’s four-season climate, the wintertime serves as the premiere season to renew and rejuvenate oneself. The short daylight hours, indoor activities and lack of sunshine provide an opportunity to complete some of the procedures that may require a little bit of downtime. Whether it is lifting and opening up those upper eyelids, getting rid of those lower eyelid bags, or addressing those wrinkles that you’ve been thinking about, take advantage of the seasonal opportunity to complete these with minimal interruptions to your normal life.

Laser resurfacing is an excellent example of a procedure that is wonderful to do in the winter months. Resurfacing can literally erase damage caused by the sun: brown spots, wrinkles, laxity and textural changes. To boot, some forms can eliminate pre-cancerous changes in your skin and may reduce your long-term risk of skin cancer.

Downtime after the procedure is variable, and usually comes with some redness and swelling that may last anywhere from two to 10 days, depending on the type of resurfacing performed and the desired results. After the procedure your skin is temporarily more sensitive to the sun, making the sunless months an ideal time to embark. Patient satisfaction is very, very high with resurfacing procedures because of the natural results that come with resetting your skin clock backwards.

Our skin truly holds our first signs of aging when we are young and actively accruing sun damage; it continues to be the most obvious tell as we progress in age. Taking advantage of this low lying fruit with a resurfacing procedure is an excellent first place to start the rejuvenation process.

Finding the right physician to perform this can be a confusing endeavor full of smoke and mirrors, so make sure that whomever you are speaking to is a true expert, fires a laser on a daily basis and is trained and capable in all of the different options available, not just the one device they happen to have in their office. I far too often see people in consultation who went to a spa they heard an advertisement for and were over-promised and under-delivered on a laser treatment like IPL,  which is not in fact a laser at all.

Winter also presents an ideal opportunity for minimally invasive facial cosmetic surgical procedures such as eyelid surgery or facelifting,  where bruising and swelling during the recovery period are more difficult to hide than with a body procedure.

Modern approaches to facial cosmetic surgery are truly minimally invasive, wonderfully effective and focused on patient safety and outcomes when compared to the cosmetic surgical procedures of old. For example, a new-school, modernly-trained surgeon can perform most of these procedures with local anesthesia and sedation. General anesthesia should be a thing or the past, it is not worth the safety risks when compared with current options.

Surgical techniques for lower eyelid bags illustrate these advances very well. Older techniques involved cutting through the skin, removing fat, removing skin and stopping there. That left many issues with scarring on the lower lid, malposition of the lower lid margin and hollowing of the lower eyelids. While patients looked reasonable initially, they often looked older than they would have otherwise several years down the road.

Our modern approach to aesthetics is founded upon an elevated understanding of facial aging. The science of facial aging is the one true science in aesthetics. This elevated understanding has recognized that we tend to lose and redistribute fat as we age as opposed to gain fat in our face. What often appears to be excess fat in our face is usually just fat that had redistributed, sunk and relocated to be out of place.

With lower eyelid bags, there is not necessarily an excess of fat, but the fat is just bulging forward. Modern techniques, called transconjunctival lower blepharoplasty, allow access to this fat in a scarless fashion through the inside of our eyelid. Instead of carelessly cutting it out, it can be put back where it needs to go and redistributed to fill in the hollow area that often exists right below the bag, called the tear trough. This borrowing fat from Peter to pay to Paul creates natural results that follow the science of facial aging.

All of these advances together mean safer and more aesthetically natural results that last many more years. These procedures can be safely performed in a day surgery setting with local anesthesia, not requiring long hospital delays or a tube in your throat.

Not all surgeons are capable of performing these minimally invasive procedures, and many still practice with a dogmatic, old school approach. You should look for a surgeon who did fellowship training involving aesthetic surgery at a reputable medical center and is of this modern, new-school mentality.

Fellowship training is extra, specific training that a physician receives after his or her residency – it is rare to find, but is one of the keys to finding the right physician for procedures like the aforementioned. To ensure you are receiving the highest level of care, seek out a dermatologic surgeon, oculoplastic surgeon, facial plastic surgeon or plastic surgeon that is board certified and has the extra fellowship training in one of these “core four” cosmetic specialties.

Cameron Chesnut MD, FAAD, FACMS, FASDS, is a Dermatologic and Cosmetic Surgery Clinical Instructor at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and practices at Dermatology Specialists of Spokane.