Unfortunately, bone loss is what gives away age, even if the surface is luminous. There’s no topical for that. Even facelifts don’t address it. You can cut the skin and SMAS, reposition it, cut away the excess, and sew everything up nice and tight and you get a tight canvas on an aged face that has the telltale contours of age --unless you get implants for your orbital rims, in your temples, in your cheeks, jaw, and chin, etc. And a lot of people who get those implants have issues with them. The edges may show, the body may reject them, they can get infected, if they are porex they may be difficult or impossible to remove.
[I once attended a seminar on the physics of implants and I was the only person in the room writhing in sympathetic agony for the patients.]
So there isn’t really any fix for what needs fixing the most yet. Women can take HRT the first five years of menopause to prevent the accelerated bone loss that usually occurs. But aside from that, I don’t know. We can make it a little less bad with good diet and lifestyle so that our losses occur later rather than sooner, but the older we get, the more the bone goes away.
No argument from me! I don’t believe there’s any way to completely halt or reverse aging and the deterioration of the bone matrix will inevitably lead to the aged look even if the skin itself is in relatively great shape.
Let’s not conflate though the aged LOOK with the health and youthfulness of the skin. As far as skin itself goes, there’s specific markers of health — dermal thickness, collagen and elastin prevalence AND quality, etc. There’s plenty that can be done in terms of treatments to wind back the clock on skin aging, that doesn’t go through the heavy artillery approach adopted by Johnson here. The thing is most people want to LOOK YOUNG as opposed to having youthful skin on old bones and that’s currently just impossible.
Of course she still looks old. She IS old. But holy crap that’s a huge difference in 4 months with no fillers, purely from improving the skin quality. Keeping skin healthy is not just a cosmetic issue.
@medaura, I read this recently about our facial bone changes with aging as it was a reference in a book entitled Breath by James Nestor.
In the book there’s a claim that chewing can help strengthen the bones. I’m not sure but I figured it was worth a shot.
Quote from the book:
“Unlike other bones in the body, the bone that makes up the center of the face, called the maxilla, is made of a membrane bone that’s highly plastic. The maxilla can remodel and grow more dense into our 70s, and likely longer. “You, me, whoever—we can grow bone at any age,” Belfor told me. All we need are stem cells. And the way we produce and signal stem cells to build more maxilla bone in the face is by engaging the masseter—by clamping down on the back molars over and over. Chewing. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe.”
Yes, he does a lot of out there experiments. As a respiratory therapist I found it really interesting though and it gave me a different perspective than I’d gotten from my schooling and years working in the field.
That’s a very interesting concept and dovetails with the work of Clinton Rubin on bone formation from vibration:
Masticating could be a similar stimulant for the jaw muscles. I think EMS definitely is and have a powerful facial EMS device for working out the masseter muscles.
Thank you! I’ll definitely be watching this video tomorrow. That might explain why when my dentist recommended an electric toothbrush I instinctively felt the vibration of it was helpful.
I had some jaw pain after a dental cleaning a few years back. So I did some shallow research on the web. And decided to build up my jaw muscles. I use Falim gum also but more commonly use a xylitol based gum to include dental health as an outcome. My last dental cleaning I noted no fatigue or pain keeping my jaw open wide.
We evolved to eat and chew much tougher foods - which are missing in our diet. Ever wonder why most of us have our wisdom teeth pulled? We have very underdeveloped jawlines and less room for advancing wisdom teeth.
I highly recommend chewing gum and working out the jaw daily. Start slowly and watch out for signs of temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMD) Unfortunately I chew like a horse - so I try to do it when solo.
Whenever I go for 2+ weeks of daily use I definitely notice overall tightening. My problem is… if I’ll spend 10 min to use it (its preprogrammed cycle) I say, I’d better get the most out of it and go max strength. But when I go max strength it’s fucking powerful, longest 10 min of my life. So I tend to find excuses to not use it. I know women in skincare Fb groups who are way more diligent in using such devices and their before / after pics don’t lie.
Anyway the way it gives results right now is by strengthening / bulking up certain muscles in the face. But it MIGHT have long term results in cranial bone preservation.
I’m also at a really high plateau from having put a lot of work into my face (near daily red + ir radiation, monthly rf microneedlong, weekly picosecond laser, periodic plasma fibroblast) so it’s hard for anything to move the needle noticeably. The skin is already in very good shape. So for everything there’s diminishing marginal returns.
The point I really wanted to make here is that there’s a lot that can be done for skin via interventions that run off electronic devices. The problem is that it only makes sense if you DIY it and buy the merch and operate it yourself. Like plasma exchange…. You want to do it weekly or so and at $6k a pop you need skunkworks or it’s a no go. The effects of the treatments are cumulative and you often get better outcomes from lower / gentler settings but if you’re a middle aged middle class woman saving your pennies for a single Morpheus RF procedure, you’ll be very disappointed— the practitioner will also invariably be biased towards harsher settings so the client gets a better bang for the buck. But what she really needs is a gentler treatment every 4 weeks forever, with other modalities interspersed with it. If you order the machines from AliBaba or AliExpress and do some research on the right settings, you can afford and get far better results than Bryan is in for. But then you’re in the business of being your own aesthetician. If however you outsource it at market prices for the one off procedure every few years, you’re just throwing money away. He’s in the unique position of being able to afford repeat sessions at market rates yet blowing it.
You bring up an interesting point. Bryan does IPL every week he says. Obviously thats probably an expensive process that most people wouldn’t want to spend the money on that frequently (aside from the issue of whether weekly is the right dosing schedule).
I’m wondering if, like the though process we’ve gone through with the plasmapheresis / therapeutic blood exchange pricing analysis we’ve done - if buying used equipment might be an approach here… does anyone here know anything about IPL equipment? What equipment is good, etc.
Prices seem pretty low - perhaps $3,000 range for some vendors and some equipment:
I’m thinking if someone wanted to try to duplicate the Bryan Johnson method (with similar class of equipment) using auctioned or used equipment (IPL , BBL):
But that equipment is overkill. The $50 device off of AliExpress does the same thing with less fanfare. The question is, is it something worth doing? IPL is not such a wonderful modality. I do have the device but rarely use it because even when money isn’t in question, time is. There’s better modalities almost ALWAYS that I could be using instead.
The “professional” devices are often identical in output to the handheld mini ones but come in bulky metal box like bases that make them look more “legit.” Once you compare the technical specifications you’re often amazed. So no need to splurge even on used equipment. Get a handheld little one from Ali for no more than $100 (for a really nice one) then see about squeezing in the time once a week to do it (once a week does seem like the right frequency). But you’d probably be getting much better return on your investment of TIME by cosmetic microneedling once a week instead.
If you want to go really fancy with IPL, with custom wave lengths, can’t do better than this: AliExpress
And I still wouldn’t even be tempted to buy it. Bryan needs a better consultant on the skin stuff. Part of it isn’t just the money. It might be a 10-20 min procedure that he should do every other day, and obviously do at home himself because life is too short to drive somewhere for that. Cold atmospheric plasma shower, for example. He needs to buy the device (less than $2k), learn how to use it (right frequency, voltage, angle from skin etc) and just fucking use it every other day.
I wouldn’t go the used equipment route because every year the models get better and better. It would be like buying an iPhone 6 now. And paying 5x what an iPhone 13 retails, if only you know where to look.
