In a new monthly Skin Care special feature on Talkabout Deirdre is joined Claire Scannell, owner of The Skin Lab in Killarney, to offer advice on caring for your skin and answering questions from listeners.
For more details on the services available visit The Skin Lab
Transcript
You're very welcome. Back to Tuesday's talk about, and now it's time, as you've gathered for our new feature on talk about, which is called the skin lab sessions. And I am delighted to welcome to the program Claire Scannell, who is going to be joining us over the next few months to tell us a little bit about the skin lab in Killarney, which is her business, Claire, you're very welcome. Thank you. Deirdre and Claire, talk to me a little bit well. First of all, let's, let's go back to the very beginning and talk about you. Have you always worked in the area of skin and beauty in that?
Yeah. So I suppose I started my journey in in skin and beauty many, many years ago, in 2002 I trained here in truly with a beauty colleg, Deirdre Connolly's beauty college, it’s gone now, and I did a two year diploma there, and you're from Ballymac, right? Belly Mac, yeah, yeah. I saw I started out, then back in 2002 and I did the beauty therapy, and I worked in spas, and I went, I had my own struggles with acne and my skin, and I was back and forth to GPS and doctors and going on antibiotics. And, you know, it really kind of affected my self esteem, the acne I can imagine. So I was always kind of drawn, then to the skin side of things, because of my own struggles. So in 2009 then the recession hit, and I off like everyone else. We went off out to Australia, and I started working in skin out there, because it was very different there. There was like, skin and laser clinics everywhere, and it was huge, you know, because of skin and the sun and the sun damage. And I started working, then for this lady, and I got into skin, and I started using the lasers and the products and on my own skin, and it started to clear it up. And I was like, All right, this is it. This is what I want to do. This works. I have full feet in it, and I wanted to get really into it and learn everything there was to learn about it. So and spread the word kind of, yeah, yeah.
And just interrupt you for a second looking at your skin now, yeah, it's very hard to believe that you ever had acne at any stage in your life,
yeah, well, it's still like, acne is kind of, you know, it'll always come and go, you know. And it's all about managing it. And sometimes I still get very mild outbreaks, but I'm able to manage them well now, and it never is to what it was, you know, yeah. And so I suppose then, when I was living in Sydney, I thought to myself, I want to learn more about this. So I went back and I studied clinical and human science Sciences in University there for a couple of years in Australia, just to get a really deep understanding of human sciences. And I then, you know, went on then and did, finished my degree, a foundation degree in laser and light and skin science. And I really got in depth knowledge of everything and experience. And I always knew I was, you know, I was working in these clinics, and I was like, seeing these women come in with really sun damaged skin, and their skin was just amazing coming out from and it was natural and healthy way of doing it as well and not invasive. So I was like, there's nothing like this at home, you know? So when I stayed working there anyway, for another I stayed out there for about eight years, and I came home, and that's when I decided, then, you know, I am to set up my own business and doing what I do. And what year was that? That was, about eight years ago. Now, okay, so you set up the skin lab. Set up the skin lab. Then in Killarney, I had a tiny little room in the reeks, and I just was on my own. I had one laser, and I just grew it. Then year on year, and I took a bigger premises in the town centre. So we have seven treatment rooms there, and there's a team of six of us. Oh, wow. So you've really built it up. Yeah, yeah, over the years, just slowly we've grown and added people, and now we've acquired a big new unit in the reeks. So I'm going back full circle to where I started. And so we're going into the reeks, and hopefully that new clinic will be ready in three weeks, so it'll be state of the art clinic. Oh,fabulous. It's all go so, so just to kind of explain to somebody with very little knowledge of the beauty industry, this isn't like a regular beauticians. This is, this is specific to skin. What you do? Yeah,
it's we focus solely on, like, corrective treatments more so than your relaxing general facials. And they do have their place. But for us, we prefer. To focus on solving people's problems, I guess, with skin conditions such as acne, rosacea, dyscomia, which is, you know, severe sun damaged or we do a huge amount of patients with broken veins and capillaries and that flushing, which is very common the west of Ireland. And we do hair removal, tattoo removal, so it's, it's solely focused on on skin and lasers,
okay? And you, you've been able to train your your staff as well yourself. So, I have one lady with me, Louise. She's a nurse, and she worked out in London doing similar and she came back here around the same time as myself, maybe a little bit before me, and she was trained as well. So I'm so lucky to have her. And I have an amazing girl as well, Lavinia, who's been with me. They've been both with me about five or six years now, and she trained in Dublin as well. So yeah, I was lucky to get them. And we've a girl as well that comes over from Italy once a month for 10 days. And she's a clinical trainer in Europe for the lasers for so she goes around training dermatologists and doctors in in lasers. So we're very lucky to have her as well, and she delivers amazing treatments, more of the in depth, severe for severe sun damage, resurfacing lasers. So I won't get too into the science at all. Okay, okay, yeah. So we have a great team, it sounds like it.
And what would be we'll say your most popular treatment?
I would say skin rejuvenation. So your vascular concerns, the rosacea, pigmentation, acne, and we do a huge amount of laser hair removal as well. Very, very busy with hair removal, yeah, yeah. And it's a big industry now, isn't it? It's exploded in the last few years, it has everyone's skin seems to be everywhere, you know, and there's lots of lots of inquiries about it. People are more knowledgeable. The customers are. They know what they want when they're coming in. Whereas when I started, I was like, you know, there was a lot of explaining and educating, whereas now people are coming to us, and they're educated and knowledgeable and kind of know what they want as well. Yeah, the power of social media, yeah, yes. And it's good in a way, because, you know, it lightens the load of our workloads, you know they want.
And do you do, like, the likes of Botox and fillers?
We have a doctor, Dr Margaret, there. She does all the Botox and the fillers, but it wouldn't be the main part of our business. There we we do. I'm more into the regenerative medicine myself and the natural way of doing things, and I think the fillers are starting to die out. Okay? People aren't looking for them as much. You know. People want more natural results. So, yeah, less people looking for that, more people looking to have them dissolved and go down the path of regenerative ways of building up their own skin naturally through different ways. Bio stimulators now are the new thing, or PRP, where you take your own blood, and we spin it in a centrifuge and it's injected back into any tissue that's degrading, you know, like around the eyes or the neck, and it naturally rejuvenates the skin.
So let's say somebody, somebody who's well gone beyond middle age and good few wrinkles and things like that, but doesn't want to go down the Botox route. What kind of things would you say to someone like that? I'd say there's a lot of our audience listening this afternoon who wouldn't want to go Botox but, but they'd like to look better than they do at the moment, not tired, maybe the bags under the eyes and the wrinkles and that kind of thing.
Yeah? So like a treatment plan, you're, looking Yeah, all right, okay, so first of all, in a way, we'd ask them to come in for a consultation. We'd ask them to bring in their products as well that they're using currently on their skin. And the first, you can achieve a huge amount of results at home yourself with the right skincare.
So we get them to come in, bring the skincare. If we felt that they had a good plan, we wouldn't recommend them. If they didn't have a good plan, then there's a certain few products that we'd want to have them on to prepare their skin before we go at our lasers. Okay, to get it nice and healthy. So if the skin is in bad condition, we'll give them a skincare plan. We'll tell them to go away for a couple of months, get the skin healthy with the skincare plan and come back in and then we'll tackle it. Depends on what it is. So let's say, if you had concerns, we'll say with sun damage, skin laxity, wrinkles, what you want to do is you want to increase collagen and elastin in the skin. So we would start that by doing some broadband light therapy, which is a type of laser. There, and we would which, which all these lasers, what they do, essentially is they create a slow trauma to the skin in a controlled way, and your skin then responds by healing. So when it heals, it lays down new, fresh collagen and elastin, so it gives it that rejuvenated look. And what the lasers are amazing, they can reduce skin cancers by 50% so we'll plan that journey for that patient over a year. We'll get them in every month, and we'll do we might start off first by doing some BBL, and then we get them onto more aggressive lasers, like your resurfacing lasers, your Moxie, your halos. And what they'll do then is you'll have a little bit of downtime with them, but if you give about a year, you can take, you know, 10 years off someone's skin with the right plan. And it's phenomenal with the results we get and counseling them along the way about skincare. And you know, the importance of sunscreen, which people have more awareness about now, which is great, but it is really, really important. You know, we can do these lasers on someone's skin, but if they're going off out in the sun, it's a waste of time. You have to pick one or the other, you know.
You must cringe when you see the young ones lying out in the sun, you know, with no sunglasses, no skincare. And just, yeah, you know, soaking it all up because you're seeing the other end of it.
Yes. And look, we were all there when we all liked to have the tan it was, you know, but there's more awareness around it now. And you know what? There's no reason to be frying yourself nowadays because the quality of fake tan is so good.
I've loads more to asks, by the way, but we're going to take a break at this point, just as to remind the listeners we're chatting here to Claire Scannell from the skin lab in Killarney. It's a new feature that we're going to have here on talk about over the next few months. And if you have any questions for Claire , 083 300 3 300. We'll take a break, and we're back with more from Claire in just a moment. Got an opinion. Share it with Deirdre
You're very welcome back, and if you've just tuned in, by any chance, I am chatting here to Claire Scannell. Claire is the owner of the skin lab in Killarney, and she's been telling us about her business and about her training and about her years studying in Australia, and fascinating stuff, really about how far the skin industry has come and the phenomenal range of treatments that are available out there. And Claire, one thing that I should have asked you in the first half was, do you see, do you have many male customers?
There's a predominantly female it's increasing all the time. I feel like, in the new clinic that we're going to because it's not as confined, and we'll have, we've it all laid out now, so that when men do come in, that they, you know, it'll be less cramped. Yeah, yeah, exactly, um, I mean, men, men are as nowadays, are as conscious of their image and their yes is what they there's still that kind of feeling around embarrassment when they come in, yeah, that, you know, we want to make it comfortable when they do come in. So, yeah, it's definitely increasing. I mean, the younger generation don't mind. They'll come in. You know, the 20 year olds are like, no, no bother to them, yeah. So it's definitely increasing. We get a huge amount of men with rosacea coming in for the lasers and the broken veins.
And, I mean, men, men get skin damage, of course, yeah. And they can't wear makeup like women, you know, so they, they, I would say, I would say maybe 10% at the moment, and growing and growing,
And I want to come back to talking a bit about acne, because it's a huge problem. And I know we have, we have our medical slot with Dr Eamon Shannon once a week. We have our beauty slot with Mary O'Donnell once a month. And we get so many questions about acne, teenage acne, adult acne, whatever. And talk to us a little bit about the kind of treatments you do for acne.
Yeah, acne would be a very we'd be very busy with acne, because, as you know, it can make people very self conscious. So if someone was coming to us with acne, we'd first assess to see if we could help them. You know, there's a stage when you do need to go to your GP or a dermatologist, and if we felt we can, there's different grades and levels of acne and intensity of it. So if we take you on as a client with us, we'll first get you on plan. And some of the products that we have are prescriptions. So we have a doctor that will write a script for some topical products that would include your two main ingredients, which is salicylic acid. And retinol, and they work brilliant. So we give we give you them to use at home yourself, along with a very simple regime with acne. The less products used, the better. You know, there's only a couple of ingredients that work for it. And I think people overuse stuff. And the Irish skin in particular is quite sensitive to these acne products, because we naturally have low Melanie in the skin, which mean we have a thinner skin, so we can't handle these over the counter acne products, so people come in destroyed from using them. So less is more. Just cleanse and moisturize daily. And we'd give them a couple of the prescription products, and we would get them in them for peels regularly, every two to three weeks for some chemical peels. And we do laser treatment called Forever clear that uses a 532, blue light laser that kills the bacteria in the acne, and it also creates this wound healing effect on the skin, which we get phenomenal results with. Now, acne, because it's sometimes, you know, it can come and go throughout life. We would often say to people, let's get you to a place where we clear it. So come in every two to three weeks, we'll we'll get you on that program. And after that, come back to us every quarter. Some people, twice a year they come back. We'll do a chemical appeal to maintain it. We'll give them the right products to use at home, and we get them to manage it themselves. And that's what we don't want to be bringing people in every month, because that's not practical, practical for people, you know? So yeah, and we get phenomenal results. We get and it's very rewarding, very
I was just going to ask you. I said, it must be so rewarding to see someone coming in and their skin is clear and they're feeling more confident and everything.
Yeah,it's probably my favorite thing to treat in the clinic.
We have some questions for you. Claire, are you ready for a few questions? Yeah, we'll start with this one from a listener in Listowe and is is raised laser hair removal really permanent, and does it work on all skin types. So what would you be getting laser hair removal for, for example.
So laser hair removed for any body hair, really, or facial hair that you have, it is phenomenal at working on darker hair. So if you have blonde or brown. Light, very, very light brown, as long as the hair has a little bit of pigment in it, then the laser can find it and work on it. So is it permanent? Yes, and no. So you get so what we say to people is coming, we'll do six sessions every six weeks, and we get it to a place that it's very fine and fluffy, so you don't even have to shave it anymore. It's what you do, but you don't have to shave it. Like, you know, some women are shaving every second day, or even men. What we'll do is we do it every six weeks, and then you get to a point when we'll say we're seven or eight months into it, and we'll put you on maintenance sessions, like everything, the body kind of always wants to revert back to its natural state of being. So it stays fine and light and fluffy. And what we do is we get people then to come in again and maintenance two, three times a year, and that keeps it away. So sometimes people are like, wow, this is gone after six sessions, and we won't see them for a year, and it might revert back slowly, or maybe they might get pregnant or something, and we mightn't see them for a couple of years, and they're back to square one again. So it's important to maintain it with the top ups, and come back in every two or three times a year to top it off. Once you get lucky in once a year is enough. Depends on the person.
Okay. And now this next question is from a texter. We've kind of covered it already, but maybe just to go over it again briefly. Claire, this person says, I would like to know the best treatment for acne scars or pigmentation.
So acne scars, so there's different types of acne scars you'll have, you know, your red marks on the skin that are left over after acne, and they're the easier ones to treat. We can treat them with some peels, and the right home care will feed them naturally over time as well. And then you have, you know, your ice pick scars, your box scars that are quite deep, and those types of scars you do need to have quite aggressive laser treatments for. And you know, maybe two or three of them spread out over six months and a little bit of downtime with them. But you know, you'll never permanently get rid of a scar, but you will get it to a place where you quite confident and happy, happy with it. It's barely noticed. Barely noticeable. Yeah, exactly
we have. This is from Maura, who says she's 40. She says I have noticeable wrinkles and dull skin. I'm interested in hearing the best non invasive treatment. To refresh my face. I see you get that kind of question a lot. Yeah, we do
so funny in your 40s is like, when men age, they make they age very slowly and gradually. When women age, you know, we lose in the 40s is when we see a lot of people come in and they'll say, I've aged overnight. And actually what happens is you lose so much estrogen in your 40s that you have it's responsibility estrogen for the collagen in the body. So you do have a drop of 30% of collagen in your 40s. So literally, what actually happens is you do age overnight. So it just comes about very, very quickly. So in order to get that collagen back up, we would say, you know, come into us. We'll get you on a really good skincare plan, and we will tackle it. Then with doing some it all depends. If you're trying to get rid of pigmentation with the aging as well. Then we would go down the route of doing a laser called the halo laser, which is phenomenal, phenomenal for resurfacing the skin and really boosting that collagen in the skin and getting it back to a place of youthfulness and thickening up that dermis and giving the skin a very pretty healthy glow to it again. And a lot of the time, people think wrinkles make them look aged, but it's not actually the wrinkles, it's the sun damage, the pigment, the broken capillaries. Once you get rid of them, like we all, we're all going to have wrinkles, and getting rid of them completely can just make people look weird. Yeah. So you know, it's all about getting the skin tone right, and getting the skin healthy and being okay with aging. You like, we've women coming into us in their 70s, and you know, they might have got a skincare skin cancer in their 40s, or a scare, or something like that, right? And it that scare has motivated them to look after their skin. And they're coming into us now in their 70s, and then done their regular treatments and looked after it and stayed out of the sun, and they, they look phenomenal, and that's kind of the the goal for, even for myself, that I would be, you know, and educating our patients coming in, and that's the goal that they should be aiming for, is just to have the skin healthy and and being okay as well with aging. So, yeah, I hope I didn't
Yeah, no, no, that's perfect. That's a perfect answer. What about the bags under the eyes? What can be done about that there?
So that is that can be or the dark circle, the dark circle. So, as we age, you lose collagen, and that's what gives that skin that thickness and that bounciness. So as you age, that gets thinner. So you can just see the vascularity of the skin a little bit. It's coming true on the skin a little bit. So again, thickening up that skin can reduce it. And a lot of people think it's something they're doing or eating or they're tired, or it's just the natural aging process of the skin starting to thin. We get great results with PRP for the darkness around the eyes. So PRP is a natural regenerative treatment to the darkening and the aging of the skin around the eyes. And what our nurse, Louise, does is she she'll draw some blood from you, and she'll put it into a centrifuge, and it'll take out the plasma, which is the extremely, extremely healthy part of the blood, and she'll inject it back in around the eyes, and it just triggers the whole healing process on that age tissue. And it can give phenomenal results. Eye creams can work as well. Peptide eye creams, they can trigger as well the collagen in your skin, a little bit of retinol as well. There's phenomenal eye creams, but again, they're not going to the combination of both the treatments and the products is what's going to give you the best results.
Very good. Well, can you believe we've run out of time already for our first session? It went very quickly, and we have more questions for you, but we're gonna have to hold them over for now. Though, you presumably have a website and all of that, and social media Claire.
We do the skinlab.ie and we're on Instagram, and Facebook as well. The skin lab.ie
So you can find us at the skinlab.ie. Our phone number is 0646636483 and or you can email us [email protected] .
