Visia uses advanced technology to provide meaningful skin evaluations, on-screen and printed reports, and tracks treatment progress. Utilizing this comprehensive complexion analysis machine, your esthetician can create a customized treatment plan that can be compared and tracked over time to reveal healthy, hydrated, and younger skin!

What are the definitions of the various skin features and how are the features detected?

Spots: Spots are typically brown or red skin lesions including freckles, acne scars, hyper-pigmentation and vascular lesions. Spots are distinguishable by their distinct color and contrast from the background skin tone. Spots vary in size and generally have a circular shape.

Pores: Pores are the circular surface openings of sweat gland ducts. Due to shadowing, pores appear darker than the surrounding skin tone and are identified by their darker color and circular shape.

Wrinkles: Wrinkles are furrows, folds or creases in the skin, which increase in occurrence as a result of sun exposure, and are associated with decreasing skin elasticity. This skin feature has the greatest variability from image to image as it is highly dependent upon the facial expression of the client.

Texture: Texture is primarily an analysis of skin smoothness. Texture measures skin color and smoothness by identifying gradations in color from the surrounding skin tone, as well as peaks (shown in yellow) and valleys (shown in blue) on the skin surface that indicate variations in the surface texture.

Porphyrins: Porphyrins are bacterial excretions that can become lodged in pores and lead to acne. Porphyrins fluoresce in UV light and exhibit circular white spot characteristics.

UV Spots: UV spots occur when melanin coagulates below the skin surface as a result of sun damage. UV spots are generally invisible under normal lighting conditions.

Red Areas: Red Areas represent a potential variety of conditions, such as acne, inflammation, Rosacea or spider veins. Blood vessels and hemoglobin contained in the papillary dermis, a sub-layer of skin, give these structures their red color, which is detected by the RBX Technology in VISIA. Acne spots and inflammation vary in size but are generally round in shape.

Brown spots: Brown Spots are lesions on the skin such as hyper-pigmentation, freckles, lentigines, and melasma. Brown Spots occur from an excess of Melanin. Melanin is produced by melanocytes in the bottom layer of the epidermis.

Is there a correlation between porphyrins and sun damage?

According to Greg Hillebrand, Ph.D., a recognized subject matter expert at P&G on the subject, there may be a real correlation between the amount of porphyrins and skin aging. “With exposure to the sun, porphyrins can release singlet oxygen that in turn can oxidize lipids (lipid peroxidation) in the skin yielding irritating and cytotoxic lipid peroxides that can cause skin damage. Thus, the presence of porphyrins in the follicular pores may enhance or accelerate hyperpigmentation, wrinkling and other signs of photo-aging by sun exposure.”