A facial is much more than simply slathering your face with clay and popping a couple of cucumber slices over your eyes. A little bit of DIY home pampering like that might feel really nice, but if you want to take the best care of your face, there’s no substitute for professional care.
That’s because a physician or licensed aesthetician will have access to products and will be trained in techniques that aren’t available for home use. “You can do some daily maintenance at home and you can do some masks at home, but to really see improvement in skin health and skin quality, it’s the in-office medical-grade treatment that’s going to give you those results,” says Dr. Kelly Sullivan, board-certified plastic surgeon and medical director of Sullivan Surgery & Spa.
Such medical-grade treatments might include a skin analysis to determine specific problems, followed by a thorough cleaning, exfoliation, and extraction. Specific exfoliation processes a person could get with a professional facial include dermaplaning, in which skin cells are scraped off with a very fine blade, or microdermabrasion, in which a tool is used to exfoliate and sand away dead skin cells. These processes are important because layers of dead cells on top of the skin can prevent healthy products from penetrating and having any kind of effect.
A professional facial will also frequently include a massage and will conclude with a mask application, which Mylène Nine, spa director of About Faces Day Spa & Salon, describes as the “wow factor” of a facial. “Professional masks have stronger ingredients than DIY ones from home,” she says. “We can also layer them with other ingredients to improve results. Adding the touch of the aesthetician is hard to mimic by yourself…They give intensive and immediate results that are very difficult to achieve at home.”
A physician or aesthetician can also determine what kind of mask will best benefit your face and skin type, depending on what problems you are trying to address and depending on whether your skin is oily, dry, red, or mature.
“One mask is a clarifying clay mask that can be used as a spot treatment or for your entire face for acne,” Sullivan explains. “There are also hydrating masks designed to deliver moisture to the skin. And there are calming masks, which you use after sunburn or an acid peel to calm down the redness.”
And in some cases, different parts of your face might need different masks applied. “The nose and chin are usually oilier, so you add a clay mask in those areas to prevent blackheads,” Nine says, “and apply a hydrating or brightening mask everywhere else.”
These in-office treatments help prime the skin so that it is more receptive to at-home care, which should include daily cleansing and a morning/evening application of the appropriate products for your skin’s needs. Kim Hart with Skin Wellness MD emphasizes that this home care is the most important part of skin treatment, and an aesthetician can provide specific guidance on what a person should do. “Regardless of what we are treating a patient for, we always send them home with home care,” she says. “First and foremost, if you want to maintain a healthy skin after our work, you must keep up with your home care to maintain the results.”
While some people opt to get facials whenever it feels good or if they want a little pampering, the professionals agree that consistency is important if you want your skin to be the healthiest it can be. Hart says the frequency a person needs a facial depends on the skin problem being treated—acne, for example, might be treated every two weeks, whereas discoloration might be treated every four weeks. “Of course it depends on how their skin can tolerate it and what kind of response we get,” she says.
Nine personally recommends people get at least one facial per season, and to turn to at-home masks one to three times a week depending on skin concerns and goals.
Dr. Sullivan encourages people to have therapeutic facial treatments on a six- to eight-week cycle. “The skin is the largest organ in our body and requires maintenance to maximize skin health,” she says. “You have to be getting regular treatments to see the most benefit.”