LET’S GO THERE: NON-INVASIVE BODY CONTOURING

Whelp, I’m taking one for the team with this post.

As you guys know I’m not one to shy away from…anything? The Skinny Confidential is all about getting the real deal. From boob jobs to now: Sculpsure.

Wait what?

Yes that’s what I said.

I’d never heard of SculpSure when they reached out to see if I was interested in trying the procedure.

……..& then of course my brain went right to The Skinny Confidential. Why not blog about it? Bring TSC community along?

I mean I’ve done weirder.

Ok, ok so what is SculpSure?

Basically it’s a 25 minute light based treatment that destroys fat cells. It’s a strap-on belt, that doesn’t require needles or surgery…well, shit they had me at ‘doesn’t require needles or surgery.’

& destroys fat cells??! HMMMmmm. SO I needed to get to the bottom of this.

If you know me you know I want to go straight to the source: the doctor.

The doctor who performed the procedure on me ( YES, me! I got it done ) is named Dr. Harry Glassman. His MediSpa in Beverly Hills, California is just beautiful. It’s on Canon Drive ( two blocks off Rodeo ). AND not only is it beautiful, Dr. Glassman proved to be a total badass doctor.

Side note: mid interview I may or may not have asked him to check my implants to see how they were looking. Michael was mortified. HA. Dr. Glassman though? Not so much. He took a look & gave me an A+.

Anyway, some background on Dr. Glassman: he’s been practicing plastic surgery in Beverly Hills for the past thirty years. He has used his talents to enhance the appearance of some of the most famous people in the world and to reconstruct birth defects, damage from injuries, and defects caused by cancer. An honors graduate of Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia, Dr. Glassman served his internship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania before coming to U.C.L.A. for his general surgery and plastic surgery residencies. He furthered his course of study with additional training at the Clinique du Belvedere in Paris, France.

In 1985, Dr. Glassman opened the prestigious facility for outpatient surgery, NOVA Surgicenter, in Beverly Hills. He sought to bring under one roof his knowledge and experience, a highly trained and compassionate nursing staff, and progressive technology and equipment. NOVA Surgicenter has been fully accredited by the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care, Inc., an organization which sets the highest standards for outpatient surgical care.

Like I said: badass. He’s highly intelligent & knows his stuff. Totally can confirm this because well, I interviewed him.

We focused mainly on the SculpSure ( this was pre-procedure ):

| Hi Dr. Glassman, can you tell all of The Skinny Confidential readers a summary of the procedure? |

Dr. Harry Glassman: This is the latest way of doing what’s considered non-invasive body contouring. Body contouring began with liposuction in the early 80’s & over the past decade people have been trying to figure out how to do body contouring without surgery.

There have been many different devices developed over the past decade some marginally successful, some not successful. We think this is probably the state of the art right now & I’ll explain to you more about how it works as we go on.

| Weird question: would you use this on yourself? |

DHG: I’ve had it done, about four weeks ago.

| Have you seen results? |

DHG: I’ve seen some results. It takes about 6-12 weeks to see the outcome but I’ve already seen a small change in the dimensions of my waist.

| Ok, so when you say body contouring to me I think of a contoured face! |

DHG: Facial contouring is very different. Usually when you’re contouring someone’s face oddly enough you’re adding to it.

People who age lose the volume in their face that’s the most significant aspect, even more so than wrinkles or fine lines, it’s the change in the loss in volume as you age. When we’re rejuvenating someone’s face we’re usually adding to it.

Fillers or fat. Repositioning their face in surgery.

When we’re talking about the body, not the breasts, the body— the abdomen, the love handles— we usually talk about making it smaller.

| So this trend the Kardashian’s created with the big, huge butt— do people come in and say “make my butt huge?” Is that popular? |

DHG: There are certain celebrities that do set trends.

There was the trend of say Pamela Anderson’s breasts which were over the top & people came in wanting to look like that. I tried to dissuade them.

And certainly now it’s the Kim Kardashian buttocks that seems to be the model that many people are after.

| What trends do you see with people who want with this procedure? For instance, do people want like a slimmer waist, the front of the stomach, the sides, what is it? |

DHG: For women it’s mostly their abdomen.. For men it’s usually their love handles & abdomen.

| If a woman who just had a baby & has loose skin comes in; would you recommend this procedure? |

DHG: No, it has nothing to do with the tightening or the change in the elasticity of your skin.

That’s one of the important things about choosing the right person to do this. Not everybody who comes here gets it done. We have to be very careful about patient selection.

We have to think in terms of treating people who have a body mass index of 30 or less which is a crude estimate. If somebody comes in here who is diabetic & obese they’re not going to get this procedure done but someone who might have one or two areas that they’re bothered by, or an area that doesn’t go away with diet, doesn’t go away with exercise, this is a fantastic way to deal with it.

| Ok for someone who comes in here and is obese would you recommend liposuction? |

DHG: No. Even liposuction is not for a person who is obese.

| Liposuction seems so invasive, I’ve seen some really bad liposuction. |

DHG: Well that’s because you only see the bad ones, the good ones you never see because they pass for normal.

Liposuction it’s a phenomenal subject but liposuction has gone through a lot of incredible improvements over the past 35 years since it was first introduced to the United States. It began in France and was brought here by a colleague of mine in like 1980 & it was at first a really crude operation with really gross instruments.

Over the 30-something years the instruments have gotten very small, which means it takes a lot longer to do, but it’s much, much more accurate. You don’t see these tremendous irregularities that we saw in the early stages.

| It really is an art, plastic surgery! Would you call this non-invasive plastic surgery? |

DHG: So plastic surgery really has two divisions. Invasive: liposuction, and non-invasive: includes things like Botox, fillers, lasers such as the one we’re talking about.

| Okay. So how have you seen everything evolve over the last; how long have you been doing what you’re doing? |

DHG: 35 years.

| How has it evolved from then to now and now it’s evolved into doing procedures like this. What’s the timeline on this? |

DHG: I think the thing that’s evolved, I think what you’re aiming at, is people don’t want to spend time recovering from surgery. They’re either frightened of surgery and anesthesia or they don’t have the time, especially in a city like this where people are busy.

Here nobody wants to stay home. Everyone wants to be busy. They have a busy social life, a busy occupational life. They prefer to get back to their regular life earlier than people did in the past.

Think about it this way— if somebody came to see me 20 years ago about body contouring I could either do liposuction or send them home. Now I have the option, if they’re the right candidate, to send them over here and say no don’t do liposuction, yours is not severe enough to consider that. Just come over here and we’ll do this once and we’ll look at it 6-12 weeks later & maybe do it a second time.

| Ok so this procedure, what I’ve been told and what I’ve read about it, like you said it’s non-invasive, there’s no downtime, you can go in and walk out and go have a cocktail with your girlfriends? |

DHG: You can workout.

| If someone’s considering this procedure is there anything negative about it? Or is it just really positive? |

DHG: It’s either positive or neutral. In other words, the worst case scenario for someone would be they didn’t improve enough.

That of course is a possibility with anything even including an invasive operation.

| Right. Ok let’s get into the specific about the procedure? |

DHG: I think there are a lot of sites online about how to calculate your body mass index. So all you have to do is put in your age, your sex, your height, your weight & it automatically pops it up. If your BMI is over 30 this is not for you. You need to go on a diet, you need to go to a nutritionist, you need to have your hormones checked, but if your BMI is less than 30 and you have isolated areas, not generalized obesity, but focal areas that are problematic that stick out.

If you don’t like the way your shirt or your pants fit, this is something to consider.

| How does it work? |

DHG: Here are the ways you can get fat out of the body. You can liposuction it which is a mechanical extraction of it. You can induce the fat to undergo a process called Apoptosis.

It is not crystallizing the fat by cold or melting the fat by heat it’s programming the fat to die over a period of 6-12 weeks. It sort of sets the fat off on a wrong course and it basically dissipates over a long period of time.

| Is this your procedure? |

DHG: No. It’s not mine it’s a company called CynoSure, which is one of the leading companies in laser technology. There’s two doors you can go through— so you can freeze the fat. There’s been a device around for the past 7 years that is widely popular. That in my estimation does not work very well very often but you’ll see a lot of promotion about it. There’s lots of ads. Lots of online things.

It’s hit and miss and I think it’s more sizzle than steak. But nevertheless that’s the cold door.

The hot door has been populated with other devices for the past ten years but they never achieved the temperature that’s required to cause apoptosis. So this device, it’s very clever what they did— fat has no nerve endings. Your fat could be heated to a tremendous degree and you wouldn’t feel it. But your skin, obviously, is very sensitive to the heat. So the way this works is there is a pulse of 20 seconds on and 10 seconds off.

So for 20 seconds the laser is putting heat into your fat. At the end of those 20 seconds you’ll feel some heat in your skin. Then we cool it for 10 seconds.. The fat retains the heat we put into it.

The fat keeps the heat and the skin loses the heat so it’s like a stepladder. The fat gets up to 20 degrees and the skin gets cool. Now another 20 seconds of heating the fat goes up to 25 degrees, now 10 seconds we cool the skin.

It’s heating the fat and the fat retains the heat while the skin needs to be intermittently cool to make you comfortable.

And eventually after 25 minutes we’re going to get your fat to 45 degrees Celsius which basically is the threshold for the fat to undergo the process of apoptosis.

For more information, check out SculpSure.

Hi, Lauryn here again— ok, so clearly I tried it guys! You know I love taking one for the team. See?:

{ SUBSCRIBE TO TSC YOUTUBE CHANNEL }

My opinion? Ummm, I loved it. Can I go again? HA! I loved it. If you know me you know I love extreme temperatures. The temperatures were totally manageable & as you can see in the video, I was talking with the nurses, texting, Instagramming, the works. It was easy, peasy. It’s only been 4 weeks & it usually takes 6 to 12 weeks to see results so I’ll keep you updated.

Here’s the thing: I’m all about a little maintenance here & there ESPECIALLY if it’s non-invasive. Let’s be real, it was fun to sit on my butt, go on my phone…& fight fat. LOL. It was almost too fun! HA. Would I do it again? Absolutely!

As always do your own research before experimenting. But I’d give this one an A after my experience.

Ultimately it’s fun to bring you guys along for the random things I do. If you like this post, let me know & I’ll start making it a thing? Like we can try new trends, the latest procedures, etc….together.

If you have ANY questions, leave them below & I’ll make sure to answer them all! Maybe Dr. Glassman even will come back? Let’s get the conversation going!

& let’s be real: I could have literally picked his brain for hours.

Talk soon, lauryn x

+ check out the ‘If Your Clothes Could Talk’ campaign here.

++ i’m wearing this black bra in video. x