Young woman on light background. Cellulite problem concept[/caption]he world keeps turning, and new things are on the horizon. This year one of the big splashes at the Aesthetic Meeting was an injectable which helps fix cellulite.
As you age, your skin tone gets worse. (I know! I know! This is going to be a depressing blog.) When this happens, you will start to see more cellulite. Cellulite is where you get irregularities, dimples, indents, and wrinkling in your skin. This makes everything not look as good.
There have been treatments out for years to try to to help this- endermologie, lymphatic massage, creams, lasers, cellfina. Many of these don’t work, or you need to do them in a series forever, or they are really expensive.
The newest thing to hit the market? QWO.
QWO FACTS:
- It is an injectable collagenase.
- It usually takes three treatments, spaced 21 days apart. The studies show improvement around 3 months out.
- The actual injection takes about 10-15 minutes.
- Its indication so far is for the buttocks.
- It takes time to work.
- The original studies were done in 1800 women.
- They tout no downtime. There may be a little bruising, but people return to normal life immediately.
- How does it work? Collagenase helps release the fibrous bands which causes a cellulite dimple. They also think it helps to redistribute the fat cells and may stimulate new collagen growth.
My thoughts?
Woo hoo! Dimples on the buttocks are no fun. I loved the theory behind Cellfina. I remember when they introduced the simple needle treatment at our national meeting. But Cellfina bought the patent and dolled up what should have been a cheap and easy treatment into a giant machine with tons of expensive single use parts. This made it super expensive. As the issues with cellulite are complex, the cellulite improvement tends to be subtle. When I looked into buying Cellfina, the doctor showing me had a whole lighting studio specifically for showing the cellulite improvement. When you have to have a specific lighting studio to show the results, that tells me the results are super subtle. Subtle is fine, but I hate anything which costs a lot for a small change.
The results you see for QWO are not giant. (you can go to their website to see before and afters.) But it seems to work. The fact it can be done in the office with no downtime is a bonus.
I would suspect that as with other treatments for cellulite that it works best for the single deeper dimples, not the wavy more superficial cellulite. The fine little wavy stuff is impossible.
Is Qwo the be all end all? No. When I am in the OR, my favorite treatment for everything is still fat. Microfat for deeper indents, nanofat for the more superficial stuff. But fat grafting is a surgical procedure where I need to harvest and process fat, so I like the idea of having a new tool in my toolbox made for an in office application.