Is Active FX a Good Treatment for Smoker's Lines?

Deep perioral or smoker's lines can be treated with fractionated CO2 laser resurfacing. We find the best results when we combine Deep FX with Active FX. The Deep FX penetrates deeper and stimulates the collagen remodeling necessary to tighten the skin while the more superficial Active FX will improve overall texture and pigmentation. Down time is not significant; most patients are healed by day 5-7 and can apply makeup to camouflage any residual redness.

I have used the Lumenis Encore with FX technology for the last few years and am very impressed with its ability to soften lines of facial wrinkling and do so with much less downtime than with previous technologies. In the past, smoker's lines have been addressed in many ways--most of which provided little to no improvement.

My experience with the FX is that to really treat these lines, you need to use a combination of DeepFX (for skin tightening) and ActiveFX (for softening of the actual lines themselves) following pre-treatment with BOTOX.

In some cases, I will go back and add Juvederm to the vermillion border and mucosa to provide a thicker base but this is often not required. Saying that, it is sometimes necessary to treat a second time if adequate improvement is not seen.

The benefit of using this technology versus the previous CO2 laser treatments is that this can be performed in an office setting under regional blocks with very little treatment discomfort and in about 20 minutes. Downtime is generally around 5-7 days depending upon the depth of treatment and most patients are very pleased with the results.