This is a long review - but I thought I should tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth!
I first started getting treatments from Melody in the winter of 2011. I am African American with darker skin (think actress Regina King) and I was nervous about acid treatments. I'd heard horror stories of Black women getting the more aggressive treatments (chemical peels, acid treatments, microdermabrasion) with horrific results. But Melody said that over the years, due to sun damage my face (esp. around the mouth & chin area) was now 3 shades darker than my declote. So the goal was to lighten me up to match the declote.
November 2011- 3x per week for Only Your Skin Banana, 23% fruit acid peels. These are not very aggressive but since I'd never got them before - they felt like fire for about 8 minutes. After 4 months, my texture was greatly improved but we still had a ways to go to lighten me up. Dark skin doesn't respond as well as Caucasian skin to lightening b/c the melanin in our skin is designed to protect us from impact. So it does it's job and won't budge. Summer 2011 (b/c of sunlight) we stopped treatment. Though I wore spf 30 every day still - we stopped for summer.
Fall of 2012 we begin again. (It's 8/2012 at the time of this review.) We got a good three months of treatments. Because she had gotten my skin to build up a tolerance to the acids- we could go with stronger treatments such as Only Your Skin PALA 50 Lactic Acid and PCA Sensi-Peel Lactic/TCA blend. The dark ring around my chin and mouth and cheeks had greatly improved but again - dark skin is highly resistant to trauma and will just create more melanocytes and keep getting darker. So Febuary of 2012 Melody brought out the big guns....microdermabrasion.
I'd heard bad things about microdermabrasion and five years ago when a friend suggested I get it - I said absolutely not. But by now I trusted Melody and let her go to town. I got a series of 5 treatments over the course of 5 months. Whoa! Honey, I looked amazing. Some of the dark coloring around the mouth was still there though. So on the 5th microderm Melody added another PCA Sensi-Peel Lactic/TCA blend acid treatment. Honey, I looked like a burn patient for 2 weeks. Then darker marks for 6 more weeks. Then 4 weeks later, Melody gave me a deep Sonic Skinscrubbing treatment which she said is like a Clairsonic on steroids. It is a scary looking 2 inch blade but was a cake walk. (I use a Clairsonic daily -per Melody's instructions - I'm telling you it has minimized my pores and completely improved my texture. I swear by that thing.)
That last deep cleansing pulled up that last bit of discoloration and my skin is heavenly. All in all, these 18 months have been an eye opener of what one can achieve under the right guidance. You definitely look worse before you look better. I had the Cover FX foundation which people use to cover tats and used that while I looked like a leopard. But my God, I look good now. (Now I'm using the whipped Stilla which only has a light to medium coverage which I barely need b/c my skin is so fabu now, honey!) I had been looking better over the whole 18 months but now when I'm in yoga, I notice my face IS the same color as my declote. I just can't believe it. The skin was so resistant at first. At one point, I thought about discontinuing b/c I just didn't think we'd get there. But Melody said "no we gotta get those melanocytes".
I'd tell anyone - man, woman or child - if you got a skin issue - go see Melody. She follows protocol, she explains the science and the biology of what your skin is going to do or not do based on certain stimuli, and she doesn't make promises she can't deliver. I think b/c she is so into the science of this stuff. She knows how a blonde with fair skin will react compared to a Latino compared to a middle easterner compared to an Asian compared to Black skin. We've got some of everybody here in LA ! And she's got the magic wand for everyone. Does anyone remember the Benetton clothing ads? That's what Melody is to skin! read more