Lift and Tighten Aging Skin with PDO Threads

These days, you sometimes find yourself standing in front of the mirror and placing your fingers on either side of your face to pull your skin back and up — just a little bit. And the image you see is one you long for from a few years back, before your skin started to sag and develop deep lines.

Now imagine that we have a way to suspend your skin in this more youthful position without the need for surgery (or your hands!). Well, we do, and it’s called a PDO thread lift.

At Skin Shop MedSpa, our team, under the experienced direction of Dr. Tiffany Su and Dr. Hui “He” Kang, offers clients a variety of tools for lifting and tightening aging skin, and we focus on PDO threads in this month’s blog post.

What drives aging skin

Anytime we discuss our med spa treatments, it’s always helpful to know what we’re up against, which helps to understand why a certain treatment works so well.

With that in mind, we want to discuss the loss of collagen, which is a primary driver of aging skin. Collagen is the most plentiful protein in your body, and it’s responsible for giving your tissues and organs structure, strength, and tone. 

Given that your skin is your body’s largest organ, it’s chock full of collagen, which supports your skin’s role as a protective barrier. Over time, however, your collagen production slows about 1% per year starting in your 20s. 

In addition to this gradual loss of collagen production, sun exposure can damage existing collagen fibers in your skin over time.

Thanks to this double collagen loss punch, you’re left with skin that’s increasingly sagging and wrinkling.

Hitting the reset button with PDO threads

There are many ways to lift and tighten aging skin, and PDO threads excel in this category because they target the underlying issue — collagen loss.

As the name suggests, PDO threads are exactly that — threads. More specifically, PDO stands for polydioxanone, a material surgeons use for surgical sutures. PDO threads are strong, but they’re also biodegradable, which means they break down over time.

To lift and tighten aging skin, we insert a cannula (thin tube) below the surface of your skin and place the threads vertically between your cheek and jawline, in the middle to lower face. 

Different PDO threads for different goals

When we insert PDO threads into your skin, we can use smooth threads and leave them in position. Afterward, your body reacts to this new scaffold and begins to develop new collagen around the threads, which lift and tighten your skin from below, resulting in more youthful skin on the surface.

We can also use threads with barbs on them— once we place them, we pull on them to catch and lift your skin, which provides you with some great immediate results after your PDO thread lift. These threads also encourage the production of more collagen over time.

We can also use threads together to enhance volume in your face in areas where you’ve developed a more hollowed-out look.

As you can see, we can tailor your PDO thread lift to your specific goals. 

If you’d like to explore this approach for lifting and tightening aging skin, we invite you to contact our office in Houston, Texas, at 713-701-1717 to schedule a PDO thread lift consultation today. You can also use the convenient booking feature on our website to schedule an appointment.