New York, Milan and Paris may be the world's fashion capitals, but Los Angeles has always been the undisputed fount from which beauty trends spring: hair extentions, fuller lips, even fuller breasts, eyelash extensions, dermabrasion, Botox, and of course, the whole size 2 craze, all sprang from Hollywood necessity, the mother of appearance inventions and innovation. Where actresses and actors lead, the rest of us follow. Youth and beauty may be their stock in trade, but when those in the forefront are dipping into the fountain of youth, everyone else can look like yesterday's news.
Plastic surgery may no longer be a luxury, but it does demand the luxury of time. When you've got a shoot date looming, a premiere, a red carpet or a magazine cover shoot, that's just out of the question. Not to mention a pitch meeting, the network retreat or the Oscars. The newest beauty fixes won't take a bite out of your schedule, but that doesn't mean they aren't real fixes. The options between a facial and a facelift have multiplied many-fold, like 3D movies. The botoxed-frozen-forehead landscape is now a thing of the past. That, and good old shots of Juvederm or Fraxel laser treatments -- applied over several months -- have been made nearly obsolete by new techniques for applying fillers and a multitude of lasers that do a multitude of things on any body part you can think of.
Prominent Beverly Hills dermatologist Peter Kopelson, whose father Arnold Kopelson produced Platoon, grew up in show business and understands the needs of its players. According to him, the best problem solver these days is a combo of laser treatments with fillers, but the fillers are applied in a whole new way.
"We don't inject to the dermis anymore," Kopelson explains. "Now we're injecting fillers at a deeper level, right above the bone -- that is where facial structure lies. We even do this under the eyes. And now Restylane and Juvederm come with lidocaine in them -- a painkiller -- so it's not nearly as painful as it sounds. When you inject on this level, fillers last six months to a year and create a better base for the structure of the skin. Sculptra, a new filler and volume enhancer, lasts about two years.
"We're also injecting in new areas like the temples. A female studio executive recently came in, thinking she might need a facelift for her jowls. All she needed was the right filler. She walked out in a half-hour with no bruises."
Kopelson's North Camden Drive office, which caters to actresses young and older, actors and execs, has a variety of new lasers. But his favorite is Smart Pulse ($500 to $1,900, depending on area treated), which no one else in the country has. It's non-ablative (doesn't vaporize the surface of the skin, like the mighty CO2 laser), takes three minutes and works well in a series of treatments to produce more collagen in the top layer of the skin. This is one of the new "lunchtime lasers," which include the Nd:Yag, the Pearl and Titan -- they all tighten the skin and make it less blotchy. And you can apply a little makeup and hit the streets right after application. "They're perfect for before awards shows," says Kopelson. "These treatments are now as prominent as stylists."
Randal Haworth, a popular Beverly Hills plastic surgeon on North Bedford Drive, performs plenty of facelifts but has come to learn that "actors and entertainment executives are very busy people. We treat one of the top choreographers in the business; she works from 7 a.m. to midnight, goes on tour with pop stars, is on the set of videos. She barely has a day to recover, let alone weeks. Everything now is designed to have minimum recovery and a precise result. "Too much filler looks freaky," says Haworth. "The new permanent gel filler Aquamid is actually removable. If a patient doesn't like the look of her poofed-up cheek or under-eye, we can stick a needle in and pull it out." The new injection techniques also have a dramatic reduction in bruising because of micro hypodermic needle cannula -- super skinny -- that just give little tiny nicks.
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