I am considering a Sciton pro-fractional laser treatment at a depth of 200 microns. What does that mean?

Hi Bender.  Microns are a metric measurement.  1000 microns = 1 millimeter and there are about 25 millimeters per inch.  So, if you are doing a 200 micron peel, it's about .2 millimeters deep.  While there's nothing wrong with a peel this depth, it will not help that much with lip wrinkles which is why they set the expectation fro 10% improvement.  You may have anywhere between 2-5 days for recovery and there will be some pain but it will be over quickly and will be mitigated by any anesthesia they use.As an alternative (for lip wrinkles), we offer Sciton Profractional laser resurfacing between 400-1000 microns for lip wrinkles.  Downtime is not that much greater (5-7 days recovery, but the results are much better.  We set the expectation that 2-3 visits would be required to have significant improvement of the skin.  We also use dental blocks for numbing and direct injected lidocaine around the lips.  Good luck with your procedure.  

Dear bender001,200microns is 0.2mm (1000 microns = 1mm). I believe that the best treatment is full-field resurfacing using the same machine (Sciton Erbium:YAG), rather than profractional.Think of your skin as a lawn. Profractional treatments punch holes like aerating your lawn and leaving the rest untouched. Full field is like cutting the lawn at a uniform height. Sometimes you combine the two.The best results I have seen from others and my own patients are when we are aggressive with the perioral area with full field resurfacing. This would be at least 300microsn full field and sometimes up to 800-1000microns. The recovery is very similar. 5-7 days back into makeup and about 1-1.5 months of redness.You can be made very comfortable with local anesthesia injection blocks that the laser is not felt at all.Michael M. Kim, MD

First of all, this laser can function in a fully ablative mode- namely all of skin off in one pass, or a fractional mode- more than 22% of skin treated in a single pass. Regardless of what mode, 0.2 mm is the depth of the laser. For deep wrinkles around your mouth, the gold standard is the CO2 laser- fully ablative, however one can still get excellent results with fully ablative Erbium Scition. In this area I normally go down to 400-600 microns, depending on the end point (varies from person to person). Another viable option is fully ablative erbium plus fractional CO2- a procedure I call hybrid laser resurfacing. all the bestDr Davin Lim Laser Dermatologist, Brisbane, Australia.