And because ADVATx doesn’t require any downtime, it also doesn’t require much in terms of preparation or aftercare. For preparation, you really just need to be cautious of anything that might irritate your skin. “For all lasers in our practice, I advise patients to avoid getting a sunburn before their treatment and limit using any skin-sensitizing agent such as alpha-hydroxy acid, beta-hydroxy acid, vitamin C, and retinoid,” Dr. Chilukuri advises.
The aftercare is all about sun protection and hydration. “We advise patients to avoid direct sunlight for 24 hours after their treatment, immediately apply a high-quality sunscreen and continue the daily use of hydrators and sunscreen,” says Forrester. She applied sunscreen for me post-treatment, which should be standard practice wherever you receive yours. Palm and Gohara second and third the use of sunscreen following any laser treatment — you should be wearing an SPF 30 or higher every day anyway — and add the recommendation of barrier-repairing skin-care products to soothe and prevent any leftover irritation (which, as far as my experience goes, wasn’t a big issue).
Other than that, most people should be able to resume their regular skin-care routines right away, according to Dr. Chilukuri. That’s exactly what I did, sans those previously mentioned active ingredients for a couple of days.
Is ADVATx painful?
Everyone’s pain tolerance is different, and the pain level of this treatment depends heavily on what condition you’re treating, where on your body you’re treating it, and how extreme your condition is.
I’m not going to lie, sitting through this treatment for my face wasn’t the most pleasurable experience in the world (and I am known to sit through six or more continuous hours of tattooing at a time, so pain is kind of my forte). It kind of feels like getting a static shock over and over and over again, and the longer you sit there, the hotter your face feels from the inside — remember, even though the surface of the device itself is cold, it’s still using ultraviolet radiation to target that redness under the surface and “selectively heat” it up to get rid of it, as Dr. Palm described earlier.
For me, the areas where it barely hurt were the spots on my face that aren’t as red or thin-skinned, like my forehead and jaw. However, the most sensitive and inflamed parts of my face — my cheeks, around my mouth, and around my eyes — were painful enough that I had to grit my teeth and clench my fists for a few minutes.
I’ve never received another laser treatment, so I can’t give you a first-person comparison as far as pain goes — but given Dr. Chilukuri’s insistence that ADVATx is less painful than other treatments and the video footage I’ve seen of some of those treatments, I’m going to go ahead and guess that ADVATx is preferable in the overall comfort department.
But once it’s over, it’s truly over. There are no lingering marks or stinging or anything like that. My skin was a little red and irritated immediately after my first session, and the following day I might have been a little drier than usual, but that’s as far as the side effects went. With each session I got (I ultimately had four, more on that soon), the less redness there was to treat, and the less irritation I’d experience right after treatment.
What results can I expect from ADVATx?
This is another thing that ultimately depends on you: how many sessions you need/can afford, what your skin condition is, how severe it is, and where on your body it’s located. For what I consider to be pretty extreme facial redness, my results were wildly impressive but did take several sessions over several months to get to the point I wanted (almost redness-free).
Forrester says her patients require an average of six sessions to get the results they want and recommended upon my first session that I come in once per month until I got my own desired results. (This stacks up with other laser treatments, which Dr. Gohara says usually require four to six sessions for optimum results.) In total, I received four ADVATx sessions throughout 2022: one in March, one in May, one in June, and one in August.
The difference in my skin before and after each session was both visible and near-immediate. From the photos placed throughout this story, you can see that my skin was red all over prior to my first treatment and was swollen and blotchy the next day. But when I woke up two days later, I could already pinpoint spots of my skin that looked different. That was the overall theme for the first two sessions: go in feeling like a tomato, come out feeling like a tomato, wake up a day or two later completely shocked and far less tomato-like.
