Senior Care - How to Provide Elderly Independence

How Can You Restore The Youthful Appearance Of Your Hands?

by Stephen Silva

Most anti-aging beauty products are targeted for use on your face and neck, claiming to help reduce the appearance of wrinkles or eliminate discoloration or age spots. However, your hands are often neglected by cosmetic companies -- and even if the skin on your face and neck looks great due to years of cremes and masks, your hands may begin to give away your true age. What can you do to restore a more youthful appearance to one of the most used parts of your body? Read on for several treatments that may be able to help you turn back the clock.


If you have spider veins or thick varicose veins on the backs of your hands, you may benefit from sclerotherapy. As you age, the collagen fibers that plump up your skin to give it a youthful appearance begin to degrade, causing skin to become thinner and saggier. This, combined with weaknesses in the vein walls that can lead to lumpiness, can result in extremely prominent spider veins on hands, visibly aging your entire appearance.

Sclerotherapy is performed by injecting a salty solution into the offending veins. This solution irritates the cells lining these veins, causing them to form scar tissue that will block blood flow. (This is harmless -- there are so many blood vessels in your hands that eliminating some surface veins won't affect circulation.) As blood flow to and through the vein is phased out, the vein will "die," receding back into your body and eventually being eliminated as waste. When a vein is treated with sclerotherapy, it's gone permanently, so although you may develop additional spider veins in the future, your treated veins won't recur.

Laser treatment for age spots

Everyone is born with a certain amount of melanin (or coloring pigment) in their skin. Over time, particularly with sun exposure, the cells that make up your top layer of skin become less dense, and melanin is more prone to pooling in one section of your skin rather than evenly distributing itself. This can cause the mild discolorations you may refer to as "age spots" or "liver spots." Fortunately, this discoloration is now easily treated by a quick laser procedure.

During laser treatment, a technician will aim a concentrated beam of light toward the spots you wish to remove. This light targets the excess melanin, disintegrating it and restoring a smooth, natural appearance to your skin. This procedure is relatively painless, and many have described the sensation as having rubber bands snapped against their skin.