Thank you for your question.
You’re 28-years old, and you've noticed that, in the course of approximately a year,
you've developed some creases and bags under your eyes.
You also state that you're an actor and you get a lot of head shots done.
In addition, you are suffering from thinning hair, and you've been taking finasteride and
minoxidil, and you're asking if either of those drugs contribute to the wrinkling under
the eyes.
Well, I'll give you a little bit about my background, and it's interesting that you're
asking me this question.
I'm a Board-certified cosmetic surgeon, I'm also a Fellowship-trained oculoplastic or
oculofacial plastic surgeon.
This means that I first trained in eye surgery before becoming a specialist in complex eyelid
surgery.
This is a super specialty—it’s a distinction from general plastic surgery which is more
of a broad specialty in the field of plastic surgery, where they get trained in a lot of
things but don't specialize as intensively in one area, such as in oculoplastic surgery.
In addition, I'm also a hair loss specialist, and I'm a founder of a company called Trichostem
Hair Regeneration, which is a solution we've developed over the past several years for
non-surgical hair thinning.
So we see a lot of patients who come to us from around the world for hair loss, and who
take finasteride, as well as minoxidil.
For many years, we were doing hair transplants as well, prior to the development of Hair
Regeneration.
To begin with, let's address the question about the drugs, and whether or not there
is an impact on the wrinkles.
To this point, I have not seen any direct correlation between the use of finasteride
or minoxidil and causing skin irritation.
Now there's one thing that might be worth thinking about, is that if you are applying
minoxidil, make sure you wash your hands after you apply the minoxidil, especially if you're
using the solution.
Minoxidil solution, as opposed to foam, has a derivative or chemical called ethylene glycol,
which is basically a diluted version of the ethylene glycol that's used in antifreeze.
Now if you happen to be touching your eyelids after applying the minoxidil, you might be
drying out the skin and causing some irritation.
It's very important to understand that eyelid skin is the thinnest skin on the body.
It's very sensitive—it’s sensitive to sun damage, it’s sensitive to dryness, it’s
sensitive to all kinds of environmental factors.
It's also sensitive to your hydration, your nutritional status, your stress levels—the
eyelid skin can be very indicative of your health.
When we look at patients, we can almost always tell who's a smoker just by looking at the
skin quality of their eyelids.
Now that being said, as a younger man who is in an appearance intensive field, you may
want to also look at the other factors that I mentioned.
Because the eyelid skin is the thinnest skin on the body, you have to ask yourself, are
you spending more time in the sun?
Are you getting enough sleep?
Are you smoking?
So you want to take away all the toxic effects on your skin before you talk about doing anything
that's more of a procedure.
Now for someone young like yourself, we would consider using something like platelet rich
plasma.
Platelet rich plasma is derived from your own blood, and it contains the healing growth
factors needed for wound healing.
We've been able to help patients improve skin texture and quality with platelet rich plasma.
Now one of the things that I always explain is that one treatment may not be enough, but
we do often combine this treatment with topical treatments.
Usually for someone young like yourself we don't use lasers, because I think that lasers
done too aggressively or too early can actually thin the skin more than thicken the skin.
Just the right amount of heat can give you some benefit, but I usually wait before considering
laser on a younger person.
I would say that you would probably be a good candidate for this combination therapy of
platelet rich plasma and topical creams—we have an under eye cream and various other
products that we've developed in our practice that we use on our patients, but it's important
to look at the foundation, look at what you're doing that might be contributing to this from
a lifestyle perspective.
So I hope that was helpful and I wish you the best of luck.
Thank you for your question.