- This is a video I've been waiting to do for years.
You guys, possibly, have been following me
for the two three years that we were tracking me
going through Accutane, changing my diet, trying all these
different medications and stuff to get rid of my acne.
Got rid of it finally.
Now we're finally going to deal with the scars
that are left over.
So this morning I tool a clip of me under
an overhead lighting.
That way, you can see the scars and their full effect.
That's when they're the worst, is when you have the light
right over your head.
So this is exactly what my face was
looking like before this.
And this video was recorded yesterday, so you will not
be able to see the after, like, of my skin looking smoother.
But you're gonna see my face all bloodied up.
We're here in Avalon Laser in La Hoya.
And we're about to go in there.
We're gonna talk to Dr. Tirgari.
He's gonna walk you guys through it.
Then you guys can see me taking
the actual surgical procedure.
I'm excited. Let's get started.
(pleasant music)
- I'm Doctor Reza Tirgari.
I'm the medical director and the founder
of Avalon Laser.
We're a medical spa with offices in downtown San Diego,
and in Carlsbad, and we specialize in making
people look better.
And I understand that our good friend, Brian, is
gonna have some questions for me, which I'm gonna be
happy to answer for you guys today as well.
Dermapen is a micro-needling device.
It's the first of its kind, it's one of the best
of its kind, and it basically works by using a
micro-needle system where there's about, array of needles
which go into the skin at about 3000 RPM.
Basically, you have a series of titanium needles
that enter the skin at pre-determined depths.
We can adjust this on the fly during the treatment.
So, for a large, meatier area, for example, on the body
or on the cheek, if we're treating the face,
we can go deeper and we can target
much deeper scars this way.
For narrower skin areas, such as on the nose, we can
adjust the needle depth so it doesn't necessarily go as far,
so we can get the exact same results
on different body areas, and magnify the results
as much as possible.
We're applying a combination of different anesthetics.
Some are gonna be much more rapid acting, and
some are gonna be much more longer acting.
This is a proprietary cream that is developed for us,
for us only.
And what it tends to do is give people the best
of both worlds.
- Okay, so now we've been sitting here for about 15 minutes
with the numbing cream on my face, and I can feel it.
Like, my whole face, it kinda feels like, you know,
when you take pre-workout (mumbles) Alanine, and you start
feeling your delts and your biceps and skin start crawling,
a little bit, like (clicks) little pin pricks.
That's what I'm feeling on my face.
So I'm pretty sure it's super numb.
If I had the ability to right now, I'd slap my face,
test it out; but I, probably shouldn't touch it.
My lips are super, super numb.
We just took all the numbing cream off my face,
and now I believe we are ready to get started.
I'm nervous, but pretty excited.
(Dermapen whirs)
- [Nurse] You'll feel a vibration a little bit.
- Back in the days, when many practitioners were working out
the best treatments, what we had to do was choose
between downtime versus results.
Part of the issues with lasers is that in order to
get to the depth necessary to cause that controlled injury,
there is also a risk of causing complications or
increasing downtime, or increasing the risk of sun damage.
Now, let me start with the sun damage.
In southern California, where the sun is pretty much
ubiquitous, when you are out in the sun, there is always
a risk after laser treatments that any exposure to the sun
can cause additional skin harm.
The skin is very, very vulnerable after laser treatments.
And because that process of recovery can be impeded
by UV radiation, there's always a risk that after any
laser treatment, any exposure to sun, which is very
difficult to avoid in southern California, can cause
complications such as burns, such as scarring, such as
hyperpigmentation, which is very common, especially
in people of color.
Dermapen avoids many of those things.
Instead of doing one aggressive laser treatment,
and trying to get to the depth necessary to cause
the skin changes that will cause the skin to remodel
and repair itself, and fix the scars, Dermapen breaks
it down into bite-sized chunks.
So by doing it at a pre-determined interval; most commonly
one month apart, the Dermapen system allows us to go
and treat the scar in smaller bite-sized chunks,
which will A, reduce the complications, and B,
reduce the downtime.
So people can go about their normal activities,
and not take a full week or two off, away from
their normal activities that would be required
with, for example, laser treatment.
- [Nurse] You doing okay?
- Yeah. Okay.
It hurts a little bit, but it's not that bad.
It kinda feels like if you're skin was getting pinched
by like, a shaver.
Like, if you're using a beard shaver.
- Many people who get the Dermapen treatments
tend to be younger, active, healthy people,
who may have had acne younger in life, and understandably,
they wanna go back to their normal activities,
including working out.
One other advantage of Dermapen compared to many
laser treatments, is because the treatments are in
smaller, bite-sized chunks, and because the degree
of inflammation is much more controlled and precise,
you don't have the prolonged inflammation and swelling
that occurs with laser treatments, following which,
any kind of sweating or activity can really
irritate the skin.
After Dermapen treatments, we find that people can go back
to activities such as working out, swimming, running,
within a matter of only a few days.
In some cases, I would even recommend only, maybe two days,
if they're doing a Dermapen treatment, as opposed to
a laser, which may have them out of commission for
even a week or two afterwards.
Sweating can oftentimes irritate the skin.
Even with the best controlled protection, it's very
difficult to avoid the skin from enduring the effects
of sweat and, of course, redness and inflammation,
which can compound the inflammation that we're trying
to induce that causes healing.
For the reasons that we talked about, Dermapen, we found,
is much better tolerated, especially in younger, athletic
people, who wanna get rid of acne scars safely, effectively,
with a minimum downtime.
How are you doing with that?
- This one's a little bit more painful, but still good.
- All this inflammation is causing the skin to now repair,
and renew, and tighten, and fix those scars.
It's important to note that the degree of scars
is what's going to determine the number of treatments
that are required.
The more aggressively somebody has scarred, the more
number of treatments it's gonna take.
That's gonna vary from person to person.
But looking at Brian right now, it looks like he just got,
a little extra time in the tanning bed.
For all intents and purposes.
- My face is super hot, which is making me really hot,
which is making my armpits sweat.
Which is sweet.
(laughs)
So when you guys get this treatment done, you're not crying.
It's just your eyes watering.
That's what you gotta tell everyone. (laughs)
- In this case, I think, after a couple of days,
Brian could, pretty much, be back at the gym
doing pretty much any exercise.
Importantly, you wanna avoid steam rooms and saunas
and all those things which can also cause additional
inflammation, that can actually do more harm than good.
- It was this morning.
- What was it?
What did you choose?
- I hit chest and triceps, man.
- That's what I would do.
- I forced a little overhead movement in there,
and it didn't hurt too bad, man.
It wasn't bad.
- Well, Brian is gonna be a fantastic patient.
We love having him here, and I think we're gonna
really have a good time treating him, and
seeing his results.
I think you're gonna find over time, with a series
of treatments, which may vary from person to person,
the Dermapen treatment is gonna give fantastic results.
And I'm really excited to see how things go for Brian.
- All right, we just got out of the surgery.
This is what my face is looking like.
You can see, it's almost like a tan line of exactly
where she went to and where she did not go to.
It's crazy; looks like I have raccoon eyes, like
I've been out in the sun for too long.
But that's what it's looking like.
I feel so weird.
My whole face is numb, like I just got out of the dentist,
but like, they missed my mouth entirely and just spread it
all over my face.
It felt like, just weird as hell getting that,
because I've never gotten any sort of cosmetic surgery
or anything like that.
So it was just weird to be in an office.
I feel like I was in Doctor 90210, but I feel great.
Like, I feel like this is gonna be good for me.
It wasn't too bad.
It was a little bit painful, you know, I wanna update
you guys on the pain.
For the most part, because of the numbing, it was
mostly just vibration and then just like a little bit
of like, I feel like, a beard trimmer, you know?
If you're using a beard trimmer.
It kinda nipped you a little bit.
That's kinda what it felt like, over, and over,
and over, and over.
But there were certain parts on my face where she didn't
quite hit the numbing, like right around the back
of my chin here.
And when she hit those spots with the needles,
because it wasn't numb, I kind feel what it truly was
supposed to feel like without any numbing.
It is pretty painful, man.
It's pretty much exactly like getting a tattoo on your face.
That was amazing.
So here's what I'm looking like afterwards.
I got a big old tomato face.
I can't show you guys what I look like multiple days yet
afterwards, but we'll do multiple, multiple episodes
on this, so make sure you keep in tune.
But now I'm just gonna follow myself along for the
next couple hours and explain to you how I'm feeling
and what's going on today.
So before I get to the car, LP has Pokemon Go out,
and he says there's a Pokemon over there.
So we're gonna go get the Pokemon for him before
we go home.
- I really don't know what it is.
I don't know if it's a Pokemon, or what it is.
- Is it that box right there?
- It's that box right there.
(laughs)
- This is so random. I love this.
So LP, LP just got his item, I guess he got a module.
I don't really know how any of this stuff works yet.
But it's funny how many people probably have stopped
at this electric box in front of this restaurant
down in San Diego.
All right, let's go home.
I do need to eat really bad.
But first, I'm gonna SnapChat a bunch of funny
tomato face snap chats, so that's gonna be really funny
seeing all the replies.
All right, 2:17 (mumbles), Taz, both of them just texted me.
But what I'm going (mumbles)...
What I'm doing right now is I'm making
a little bit of lunch.
So what I have is a half spaghetti squash, cut right in
half, and I cooked this for seven minutes in the microwave,
and if you never seen spaghetti squash before,
basically once you cook it, you can just use a fork
and kinda slap it down like this, and what happens...
I'm only doing it with one hand, so it's hard.
But what happens is you get kind of like noodles,
and they're super low in calories, high in fiber,
so it's a dope way to get like, a low calorie,
high volume meal in.
And that is gonna be the spaghetti noodle base,
and then this is gonna be like, the dish itself.
So what I got here is a bunch of spinach on top.
I got textured vegetable or soy protein.
So I have a half cup of that.
If you guys haven't looked into that yet, you should
look into that.
It's dope, high protein.
Then I got an onion that I cut in half.
I have a yellow bell pepper, and I have some mushrooms,
and this is going to be mixed with a little tomato sauce
and then all of it's gonna go in this bowl, so
let's see what it looks like right now.
And that is what we are looking like.
Got the little yellow noodles right there, with the red...
This actually looks really aesthetic.
It looks like a chunky Italian sauce or whatever.
So what I'm doing is I'm putting on
a little nutritional flakes.
I use these kind of like my Parmesan cheese.
Like a little topping.
But what nutritional yeast does, is it adds B12,
protein, and fiber.
It is a super food, if you wanna use that term.
But yeah, so here's my lunch.
I'm super stoked about it.
Here's my current situation.
I've got this big ass fan, I've got this cute little girl's
mini fan right here.
Both pointing at me while I'm editing this video,
so I don't sweat.
This is what I'm looking like about three hours afterwards.
I've been editing the video since right after I got home.
My face is still, it stings in a way.
It feels like a sun burn.
It feels like a bad sunburn that's just kinda like
has that heat thing going on with it.
And after I turn the fan off I'm starting to already sweat
again, but that's what we're looking like.
Anyways, my friends, I was so amped to bring you guys
on this journey with me.
I was so amped to just get it done, because you guys know,
it's been a very long time coming.
Been going through this whole series of dealing with acne,
getting it cleared up, and then all the semantics
of actually like, finding out how to get the surgery
scheduled, and videotaped and everything.
And now it's finally done.
We're gone through the first treatment.
I'm going through three treatments.
I will be updating you guys with each treatment,
so make sure you subscribe so you can see the updates
with how my face looks, the before, the afters with
the acne scar surgery, and just general tips
and other things that come along with the surgery
and other acne videos that I come out with.
But, that brings us to the end of this video.
A huge, huge, huge thank you to Doctor Tirgari for
allowing me to bring the camera in, and actually taking
the time out of his day to make sure he was there
for the procedure, so he could give you all that
extra information and talk to you guys.
I hope there was a lot of questions answered for you.
I hope you kinda have a better, more clear idea of
what the Dermapen is, and whether or not it's the
right thing for you.
Make sure that you guys follow me on SnapChat; BrianTurner.
Make sure you follow me on Instagram; ThickSolidTight.
Make sure you hit the thumbs up button on this video.
Make sure you leave a comment.
Let me know what you thought below.
And subscribe if you're not subscribed already.
(mumbles)
CT!
- Lift heavy, or die mirin.
(rap music)