Do I Have to Treat the Entire Face With Fraxel If I Only Need A Certain Area?

  If your acne scars are deep, I can think of other treatments that may be  more effective than Fraxel. But yes, Fraxel can be used just to treat certain areas of the face..

There are 3 Fraxel lasers: repair, restore and dual/thullium.  It sounds as if you had the Fraxel restore.  The Fraxel restore is the only Fraxel laser that we recommend for partial or full face treatments.  In Orange County Fraxel is very popular and we do many Fraxel restore treatments on both full face and partial face.

Yes, it is certainly possible to treat only the areas affected by acne scarring. When treating isolated or partial areas of the face it is important to feather the area of treatment outward to avoid areas of demarcation that might otherwise result from several laser treatments in one spot. Although such demarcation is not significant with Fraxel, I still think feathering outward provides better blending and a better overall result.

Best wishes, Ken Dembny

In my practice we very commonly treat small areas of acne scars with the Fraxel restore (1550 nm) laser. Often we combine it with pretreatment with 90% TCA (CROSS technique) for any ice pick type scars - or sculptra if there is a large area of subcutaneous tissue loss in the area (like a deep valley). If a patient has a lot of sundamage there can be some difference in the treated versus untreated skin so we will do at least a few full face treatments in these patients to correct the sun damage but because acne scars need more treatments, the areas affected by scars may receive more treatments as a spot treatment.