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Collagen Season: The June Med Spa Specials I’d Actually Book

Here is something nobody at a med spa will tell you in June. This is the worst month of the year for your face.

The sun is brutal right now. The pool is open. Half of El Paso is outside between ten and four, which is the exact thing that ages skin faster than any birthday. And what does the wellness world sell you in response? A glow facial for the wedding next weekend.

I want to argue for the opposite. Skip the quick fix. June is when you start the slow stuff, the treatments that compound across the summer, so the face you have in September is better than the one you have right now. I think of it as collagen season.

Three things are on our June board. These are the three I would book if it were my money and my face. Here is the honest version of each, the read you would get if you were sitting across the desk from me.

Renew. The Sculptra package, three vials, $1,725.

I have written before that fillers are a tax. I stand by it. So it should mean something that the first special on this list is, in my opinion, the best non-surgical money on the board, and it is not a filler.

Sculptra is a collagen biostimulator. The active ingredient is poly-L-lactic acid, and it does not work the way a hyaluronic acid syringe works. A traditional filler sits under your skin and takes up space on day one. You leave the office full. Sculptra does almost nothing visible on day one. It triggers your own body to lay down new collagen over the following weeks and months, and the result builds slowly, from your own tissue, on your own scaffolding.

That difference is the entire point.

A filler is a thing in your face. Sculptra is your face making more of itself. One of them you have to keep buying to maintain. The other one is, in the most literal sense, an investment in your own collagen.

Why three vials, and why as a package. Sculptra is a series. You spread the vials across a couple of sessions, a few weeks apart, and the collagen builds in layers. The package at $1,725 just locks you into finishing the protocol at a better price. The most common way I see people waste money on this product is paying vial by vial and quitting after the first one, before their own collagen has done much of anything.

Two honest cautions.

One. This is slow. If you want to look different for an event in two weeks, Sculptra is the wrong tool and I will tell you so. The payoff shows up around the eight to twelve week mark and keeps improving after that. Start in June, peak in fall. That is the trade.

Two. Technique is everything with this product. Sculptra has to be reconstituted correctly, given time to sit, and injected in the right plane by someone who understands biostimulators, or you get nodules instead of a result. That is exactly why the package runs under my supervision and not at a strip-mall injectables bar.

Restore. Microneedling with PRP/PRF, $1,500.

If you have read this blog for any length of time, you know I once wrote a post about vampire facials. It is still one of the most-read things I have ever published, and the science behind it is the second special on the June board.

Microneedling with PRP/PRF is the grown-up version of that treatment.

Here is the mechanism, in plain English. We draw a small amount of your blood and spin it down to concentrate the platelets and the growth factors they carry. That is the PRP, platelet-rich plasma, or PRF, platelet-rich fibrin, which is the newer preparation that releases those growth factors more slowly and over a longer window. Then we use a microneedling device to create thousands of microscopic channels in the skin, and we drive your own concentrated growth factors down into them.

The needling alone triggers a wound-healing and collagen response. The growth factors pour fuel on that response. The result, over a series, is better texture, smaller-looking pores, softened fine lines, and the kind of glow that is actually new collagen and not just a temporary flush.

What I like about this one for June specifically. It is your own biology, so there is nothing foreign going in. It pairs beautifully with the Sculptra patient who wants surface quality and deep collagen working at the same time. And the $1,500 package price is built around a series, because one session is a nice afternoon and a series is what actually changes the skin.

One rule I will not bend on, and June makes me say it twice. Stay out of the sun. Freshly needled skin that hits the pool the next afternoon is begging for a pigment problem, and an El Paso summer punishes that mistake harder than almost anywhere else in the country. Sunscreen and shade between sessions. Every time.

Revive. A complimentary gift with the purchase of three skincare products.

This is the quiet one on the board and the one I most want patients to actually take.

The deal is simple. Buy three medical-grade skincare products and the gift comes with it. No drama. But the reason I am putting my name behind a skincare promotion at all is that skincare is the foundation under everything else on this list, and it is the part patients skip.

You can biostimulate collagen with Sculptra and resurface with microneedling, and then undo a good chunk of it by washing your face with whatever was on sale and skipping sunscreen. Medical-grade skincare is not the drugstore product with a nicer label and a worse price. It is higher actual concentrations of the ingredients that do the work, a real retinoid, a real vitamin C, a real medical sunscreen, formulated to get through the skin barrier instead of sitting on top of it.

Three products, chosen for your skin, used every day, is the cheapest anti-aging on this entire page. The gift is just the nudge to finally build the routine.

A clean comparison

Where to come, East or West

The Med Spa at Southwest Plastic Surgery runs out of two El Paso locations, and the June specials are valid at both.

The Eastside office is at 1387 George Dieter Drive, Building C, El Paso, Texas 79936.

The Westside office is at 5925 Silver Springs Drive, Suite C, El Paso, Texas 79912.

You can book at either. My Med Spa team works across both sites, the protocols are the same, and you should pick the side of town that fits your week. If you want to see the full menu, the Med Spa page and the microneedling page on our practice site are the place to start.

A note on who is doing the work

When you walk into my Med Spa, you should know whose name is on the room. Mine. I trained in plastic surgery at Mayo Clinic, I am double board-certified, I teach the residents at Texas Tech as a Clinical Associate Professor, and Castle Connolly has named me a Top Doctor thirteen years running. None of that is decoration. The Med Spa is the non-surgical half of my surgical practice, and I write the protocols myself.

That is the only reason I will attach my name to a Sculptra package or a vial of your own platelets. If the standard slips, I do not put my name on it.

Ready to talk?

Call our Med Spa at (915) 590-7907 to book any of the June specials at the Eastside (1387 George Dieter Building C) or Westside (5925 Silver Springs Suite C) office. For surgical or combined consults, call my main office at (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book online at agulloplasticsurgery.com/appointments. Follow me at @RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook. #StayBeautiful

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Preservation, Not Minimalism: I Wrote a Manifesto for Connectively

I keep hearing the same thing in consults. “Doctor, plastic surgery is going smaller now, right? Less volume. Subtler results.”

Half true. Mostly misleading.

Connectively just published my bylined piece on this, and I wanted to push back on the frame in my own voice here too. Volume has not gone anywhere. Patients in my OR this month still wanted fuller breasts. Fuller hips. I still placed implants. I still grafted hundreds of cc of fat per side.

What changed in the last decade is what we refuse to damage when we add that volume.

The Old Bargain

For thirty years, adding volume came with a quiet compromise we did not really put into words for patients.

Breast augmentation, the way I was first taught to do it in training, meant a wide pocket dissection. That meant cutting through the suspensory ligaments of the breast. Those are the fibers that hold the breast up against gravity. We took them down to make room for the implant and we did not think twice about it. The implant looked great at six months. At year five, the breast started to bottom out, and by year ten the patient was back asking what happened.

Gluteal fat grafting in its early era was a free pass. Pre-2015, the field grafted into and through planes that we now know are dangerous. Plenty of surgeons added beautiful volume. A subset of patients did not survive it. The complication that killed people was fat embolism, and the cause was depth, not volume.

Facelifts of that era depended on tension. We pulled skin tight over tissue that had already failed structurally. At one year the patient looked rested. At ten years the patient looked pulled. The lateral sweep. The wind-tunnel mouth. That look did not come from “too much” facelift. It came from a facelift that was working only at the surface.

We did not really articulate any of that to patients at the time. Two reasons. The long-term follow-up data on these trade-offs was incomplete, and in some cases still is. And we did not have reliable alternatives. So we delivered volume, and the side effects came due fifteen years later in someone else’s consult room.

I had the luxury, during my Mayo Clinic plastic surgery fellowship, of seeing both eras in the same hospital. The old habits and the new evidence in the same hallway. That bothered me then. It still drives how I plan a case now. So does the Ponytail Academy training I did later, intermediate course in Pittsburgh, advanced course in Santa Monica, which gave me a deep plane facelift approach that holds at year ten the way an earlier-era SMAS tightening simply does not. Thirteen consecutive Castle Connolly Top Doctor years (2014 through 2026) is a long enough patient sample to feel honest about that claim.

What Preservation Actually Looks Like in My OR

The word “preservation” gets used loosely. So let me show you what it actually means at a case-planning level, by procedure.

Breast Augmentation

I am using ergonomic, lighter implants now (Motiva is the line I use most, see my Motiva Preserve post for what the recovery actually looks like). They project differently, with less weight per cc on the native tissue. That alone lets me use a slightly smaller implant for the same on-camera result.

My pocket dissection is narrower. The suspensory ligaments of the breast, particularly the inframammary ligament along the fold, are preserved instead of divided. The dual-plane release is precise rather than broad. The implant sits where I put it and stays there, because the soft tissue scaffold underneath it is still intact.

My patient leaves the OR with a result that looks finished on day one. The deeper test is what the breast looks like at year five and year ten. That is what preservation buys.

Gluteal Fat Grafting

If you are a regular reader, you know I do not graft above three or four hundred cc per side without a reason. The reason for me is not volume restraint. It is plane discipline.

Every BBL I do is ultrasound-guided. The probe sits on the buttock while I am cannulating. I can see the fascia. I can see the cannula. I can see the plane I am working in, in real time. That is not optional anymore. That is the standard.

Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred cc per side is achievable safely now in carefully selected patients with the right anatomy. Volumes that fifteen years ago carried a risk profile I would not accept. The volume number is not the safety story. The plane is the safety story.

This is the era I trained into. I sit on safety task forces for the Aesthetic Society and the conversation is no longer whether to use ultrasound. It is which probe and how to teach it.

Facial Volume

Here is where most patients have the wrong mental model entirely.

The patient sits down and tells me, “I do not want to look puffy. I do not want filler face.” Good. Neither do I. So I am going to put more volume in your face than you think, just not where you are picturing it.

Aging is not a wrinkle problem. Aging is a volume-loss problem. Deep facial fat compartments empty out over decades. Bone resorbs. The midface loses structural support. The skin you can see is the last thing to fail, and tightening it without restoring what collapsed underneath is the wind-tunnel facelift I described above.

A preservationist face today gets more volume, placed deeper, in the compartments that actually emptied. Buccal extension. Deep medial cheek. Pyriform aperture. Done correctly, the patient does not look “added to.” They look like themselves, ten years younger, because the architecture is back. I cover the technique side of this in my Deep Plane and Ponytail Lift post on this same site.

The Face Volume Surprise

I want to sit with this one for a paragraph because it is the most counterintuitive part of the whole conversation.

Filler trends pushed in the opposite direction. We watched a decade of overfilled, surface-level work go viral. Patients walked into my office showing me Instagram screenshots of what they did not want. Reasonable.

The correction was not less volume. It was deeper volume.

Volume placed superficially, in the wrong compartment, without regard for architecture, gives the puffed, frozen, unnatural read everyone fears. Same patient, same milliliter count, placed in the deep medial cheek and along the bony pyriform: that patient looks rested, not filled. The volume restored structure. It did not distort it.

This is also why I keep telling patients that fillers, used the wrong way, are a tax. You pay every nine to eighteen months, and you slowly add surface volume in places that should not carry it. A correctly planned surgical fat graft, deep, compartment by compartment, lasts years and does the architectural job instead of the cosmetic one.

What To Ask At Your Consult

If you take one practical thing from this piece, take this. The question to bring to a consultation is no longer “How much volume can I get?”

The better one is “What do I want preserved?”

For a breast augmentation: ask the surgeon how wide the pocket dissection is, and how they handle the inframammary ligament.

For a gluteal fat graft: ask whether ultrasound guidance is used intraoperatively, and which plane they graft into.

For a facelift or facial volume restoration: ask which compartments they target, and at what depth.

A surgeon who answers in those terms is operating in the modern framework. A surgeon who answers only with the volume number, with no thought to what is preserved underneath, is using a thirty-year-old playbook on a 2026 patient.

I wrote the full version of all of this for Connectively, with examples and the broader case the field needs to make to patients. You can read it here.

Volume was never the issue. It never was. What we have learned, sometimes the painful way, is that volume and preservation are not in opposition. The craft is knowing precisely where to put what you add, and what you refuse to damage to get there.

That is the shift worth paying attention to.

Ready to Talk?

If you want to have this conversation in person, my office line is (915) 590-7900 and our text consult line is 1-866-814-0038. Book online at agulloplasticsurgery.com. Follow along at @RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, and @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook.

#StayBeautiful