Puff Piece: Test Driving the Newest Solutions for Keeping Skin Fit and Firm
BY ALISSA BENNETT
January 13, 2020
The first time it occurred to me that puffiness was a mortal sin, I was a 19-year-old model on the set of a beauty shoot. “She’s puffy,” I heard an invisible critic hiss from the back of the studio while an assistant spackled concealer under my eyes. “She’s very puffy.” Throughout history, women from Marilyn Monroe to Ashley Judd have suffered similarly for their ostensible excesses—too much champagne, too much surgery, too much filler, too much food. I have come to see my own puffiness as the voluminous souvenir of elective overindulgence, but the cause can also be unpredictable.
“Puffiness is a sign that there is an imbalance in the body,” Joel M. Evans, M.D., director of the Center for Functional Medicine in Stamford, Connecticut, tells me, sharing a list of balance-altering offenders, from stress and lack of sleep to alcohol and processed foods, which can incite inflammatory chemicals called cytokines throughout the body. When detecting individual puffiness, Evans explains, “the first thing we do is find out what kind of living a person is doing,” a lifestyle assessment David Colbert, M.D.—the dermatologist and internist behind the New York Dermatology Group—often follows with a blood draw to check metabolic functions and to ensure sudden swelling isn’t caused by something more serious, such as hypothyroidism or high blood pressure. After a particularly hedonistic dinner (multiple rounds of dim sum, with multiple glasses of wine), Evans’s words strike a chord. Could I in fact be living better?
The first time it occurred to me that puffiness was a mortal sin, I was a 19-year-old model on the set of a beauty shoot. “She’s puffy,” I heard an invisible critic hiss from the back of the studio while an assistant spackled concealer under my eyes. “She’s very puffy.” Throughout history, women from Marilyn Monroe to Ashley Judd have suffered similarly for their ostensible excesses—too much champagne, too much surgery, too much filler, too much food. I have come to see my own puffiness as the voluminous souvenir of elective overindulgence, but the cause can also be unpredictable.
“Puffiness is a sign that there is an imbalance in the body,” Joel M. Evans, M.D., director of the Center for Functional Medicine in Stamford, Connecticut, tells me, sharing a list of balance-altering offenders, from stress and lack of sleep to alcohol and processed foods, which can incite inflammatory chemicals called cytokines throughout the body. When detecting individual puffiness, Evans explains, “the first thing we do is find out what kind of living a person is doing,” a lifestyle assessment David Colbert, M.D.—the dermatologist and internist behind the New York Dermatology Group—often follows with a blood draw to check metabolic functions and to ensure sudden swelling isn’t caused by something more serious, such as hypothyroidism or high blood pressure. After a particularly hedonistic dinner (multiple rounds of dim sum, with multiple glasses of wine), Evans’s words strike a chord. Could I in fact be living better?
In the interim, I head to The Light Salon, the cultish London-born LED atelier, where the collagen-stimulating and inflammation-reducing menu of services is as easy to access as a blowout. “We spotted a gap in the market,” explains Laura Ferguson, a longtime spa manager in the U.K., who cofounded the company to bring the NASA-approved light-emitting diode technology out of exclusive facialist studios—and, as of this fall, into a Nordstrom near you. (A U.S. flagship at the newly opened New York store is joined by three additional locations.) “The light also helps cortisol levels go down and serotonin levels go up,” Ferguson elaborates on the 40-minute session of facial LED with a collagen mask add-on and lymphatic massage compression pants that I select. And the feel-good hormones do feel good. But looking in the mirror after my treatment feels better. “Nothing else comes close,” celebrity facialist Angela Caglia tells me of the sculpting and brightening power of LED, which prompted her to start distributing a portable mask from the Korean company Cellreturn that can extend the benefits of her in-office treatments. With 1,026 individual LEDs—“the highest number currently available for at-home use,” she says—it is deliberately excessive. Caglia tells me I can use the mask every day—just the kind of overindulgence I’ve been looking for.
