Tag: southwest plastic surgery medspa

The Last Stretch of Summer: The August Med Spa Specials I’d Actually Book

I put together this month’s Med Spa board in late July, sitting at my desk after clinic, and I kept coming back to the same thought while I looked at what my team had lined up. August in El Paso still has the pool open, the sun is still doing real damage between about ten in the morning and five in the afternoon, and by this point in the summer most of my patients are not asking me about sunspots anymore. They are asking about their eyes. Tired eyes, puffy eyes, the kind of look that concealer does not really fix because concealer was never built to fix skin that is worn out.

So the board this month has three things on it, and honestly two of them are going after that same eye problem from two different angles, while the third one is about getting ahead of your own body before summer runs out. I want to go through all three the way I would if you were sitting in the chair across from me, because a flyer with a percentage sign on it does not tell you much on its own.

Renew. Laser Hair Removal, 15% Off Bikini and Underarms Packages.

I tell people August is actually a smarter month to start laser hair removal than January, and most people do it the other way around because January is when the resolutions hit.

The way the laser works is not complicated once somebody walks you through it. The device is tuned to a wavelength of light that gets absorbed strongly by melanin, which is the pigment sitting inside your hair. That light turns into heat once it hits the follicle, and if there is enough heat the follicle gets damaged, and damaged follicles either grow back thinner and sparser or, for a good number of them over time, stop growing hair at all. None of that is controversial and it has been understood for a long time.

The part that trips people up is that your hair is not all on the same clock. Every individual follicle has its own cycle, an active growing phase and then a resting phase, and it goes through that cycle more or less on its own schedule, not in sync with the follicle next to it. The laser can only damage a follicle that happens to be actively growing right when you are being treated, which means a follicle that is resting that day walks away untouched and will need to be caught on a later visit once it wakes back up. That is the actual reason this is sold as a series of appointments spread a few weeks apart rather than as one visit that finishes the job. You are not buying one treatment, you are buying enough visits to eventually catch most of your follicles somewhere in their growth phase.

Bikini and underarms get bundled together as a starter package mostly because they are both areas that cycle relatively quickly and respond well, so pairing them tends to be a better deal than paying for each one on its own schedule.

I will also say, because I think every patient deserves to hear it before they book, that skin tone changes how this has to be done. Darker skin has more melanin in the skin itself and not just in the hair, and that changes both the risk of a burn or a lingering pigment change and the settings the device needs to be run at. That is a judgment call for trained staff working under a physician, not something that should be run the same way for every single patient who walks through the door regardless of skin type.

Restore. Morpheus8 Under Eye, $800 for a Package of Three.

Morpheus8 has been part of my practice for a while, and I have mostly used it on the body for tightening skin. Using it specifically under the eye is a more targeted application of the same machine, and it tends to be the first thing I bring up when a patient’s problem is really about their skin and not about lost volume.

Here is where I slow down with patients, because this is the part that gets confused constantly and the two things genuinely look almost identical staring back at you in a mirror. Tired under-eyes can come from losing volume, meaning fat under the eye that has thinned out or shifted with age, and that reads as a hollow spot or a shadowed groove that makeup cannot fill in. Or the tiredness can come from the skin itself, crepey texture, a little bit of sag, fine lines, none of which has anything to do with volume and everything to do with the collagen underneath getting thinner with time. Morpheus8 is not going to put volume back where it used to be. If a patient’s real issue is a hollow from lost fat, I say that to their face and point them somewhere else, because pretending otherwise would just waste their money. What Morpheus8 does handle well is that second category, the actual skin.

Mechanically, the device pushes a grid of very thin, insulated needles just under the surface of the skin and sends radiofrequency energy through them at a controlled depth. The needling by itself starts a healing response in the tissue. The radiofrequency energy on top of that adds heat at a specific depth under the skin, which is what remodels the collagen and tightens things from underneath, with no incision and without touching the visible surface of the skin at all. Around the eye, where the skin is thinner and more delicate than almost anywhere else on the face, that lets us treat crepiness and mild sagging in a spot where a lot of other energy-based devices are simply too aggressive to use safely.

The reason it comes as a package of three rather than one appointment is that collagen does not remodel itself overnight. On the body, where I have used this device for years, patients see part of the result right away and then watch it keep improving for about two months as new collagen forms, and the same general timeline holds under the eye. Downtime is minimal, we numb the area with a topical anesthetic first, and most patients deal with some mild redness or sensitivity for a few days afterward rather than anything that keeps them off work. A single session softens things a bit. A full series of three is closer to the change most people are actually picturing when they ask me about this.

Revive. EZ Gel, 20% Off Per Session.

Anyone who has read my writing for a while has probably seen me write about PRP and PRF before, platelet-rich plasma and platelet-rich fibrin, both made from a patient’s own blood, usually in the context of microneedling and what people call the vampire facial. EZ Gel takes that same underlying biology one step further, and by coincidence it is aimed at the exact same tired-eye problem as the Morpheus8 special above, just coming at it from the opposite side.

The prep work starts out the same way PRF prep always starts. We draw a small amount of blood and spin it down to isolate the platelet-rich fibrin, and for EZ Gel specifically we also pull albumin out of that same sample. What we end up with is a gel made entirely of the patient’s own material, loaded with growth factors and proteins that tell the body to start laying down new collagen wherever we place it. The areas people use it on most tend to be the same spots where both volume and skin quality fade first as we age, which is under the eyes, around the mouth, and at the temples.

That overlap is exactly why it pairs well with Morpheus8 instead of competing with it for the same appointment slot. Morpheus8 works on the collagen scaffold that is already sitting there under your skin. EZ Gel adds a small amount of your own biological material into a spot that has genuinely thinned out, which edges closer to replacing lost volume than Morpheus8 ever will. One is a quality treatment, the other is closer to a volume treatment, and neither one involves putting something synthetic into your face.

I ask for the same patience here that I ask for with any biostimulator. It takes weeks after each session for your own collagen response to build, a maintenance visit once or twice a year keeps the result going, and nobody walks out of the office that same afternoon looking noticeably different. If a med spa somewhere is telling you otherwise about a treatment like this one, it is worth asking exactly what they are injecting.

A Clean Comparison

Where to Come, East or West

The Med Spa at Southwest Plastic Surgery runs out of two El Paso locations, and all three August specials are valid at both of them.

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.

The same team and the same protocols run at both sites, so pick whichever side of town works better with your schedule. If you want to see the fuller menu before you call, the Med Spa page on our practice site is a good place to start.

A Note on Who Is Doing the Work

When you book at my Med Spa, it is worth knowing whose name is actually on the room. Mine. I trained in plastic surgery at Mayo Clinic, I am double board-certified, I teach residents at Texas Tech as a Clinical Associate Professor, and Castle Connolly has named me a Top Doctor for thirteen years running now. The Med Spa runs on that same standard, not on a slogan painted on the wall.

Ready to Talk?

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