THINNING SKIN
‘THE BEST WAY TO TACKLE IT IS WITH HEAT RESURFACING’
The make-up: Top make-up artist Caroline Barnes suggests carrying an eye cream with you during the day, ‘to pat over your make-up after application and throughout the day to maintain hydration’. Any cream/ serum/oil would work, but eye creams are nice as they feel lighter. Correctors/concealers will help, of course (see ‘Dark circles’), and to freshen eyes further, use the old-school trick of lining the waterline of your eyes with a soft off-white kohl pencil, such as Charlotte Tilbury’s Rock’n’kohl Liner Pencil in Eye Cheat (above, £19).
The products: Respected chemist and founder of beauty brand Lixir, Colette Haydon says, ‘I believe there is no such thing as a cream that’s good for one part of your skin and not the other.’ In other words, use your usual unguent all around your eyes and you’ll be doing all you can. We have yet to test a cream that visibly thickens the skin, but we live in hope.
The treatment: Resurfacing. Thinning skin affects the whole eye area and will exacerbate dark circles, crepiness and bags. The best way to tackle it at the moment is with a form of heat resurfacing, which is safe to use around the eyes (no bright laser lights), and relatively straightforward. The theory goes that the heat inflicts controlled damage to the dermis, prompting it to heal. Cue lots of lovely new collagen and elastic cells, and (potentially) plumper, tighter skin. Tixel, which has been described as a ‘waffle iron for crow’s feet’, delivers a ‘controlled burn’ using nothing more fancy than tiny metal rods. (Our tester had it with Dr Tapan Patel and felt her lines were softened and her eyelids tighter.) Or you can try radio frequency, which again is a means of delivering heat. We rate Scarlet, which combines radio frequency with needling and is available at Dr Sebagh’s clinic in London. Or book in with advanced facialist Teresa Tarmey, who can prescribe a bespoke combination of radio frequency and fractionated radio frequency (the latter is similar to Scarlet, with a combination of heat and needles). ‘I particularly noticed the difference with the combined radio frequency and needling treatments,’ says Red’s beauty director Annabel Meggeson. ‘And I like that you can use them all around the eye, including the lid. They’re not too painful and the downtime is minimal. You need repeat treatments to really see a benefit, though.’