Whether they’re marking your face or legs, you’re not sure why you have spider veins or when, exactly, they first emerged on your skin. What you do know is that you’d like to make those thin red lines or weblike networks of broken blood vessels disappear for good.
As an aesthetic medicine expert who offers targeted antiaging solutions for a full scope of cosmetic concerns — including unwanted spider veins — Nawo K. Fiamo, ARNP, and our team at Fiamo Aesthetics are here to help.
Read on as we discuss the ins and outs of this common superficial vein problem, including how our noninvasive laser treatment can clear them from your skin in no time flat.
A common cosmetic concern
Spider veins may appear as thin red vascular lines on your skin or as a sprawling web of dilated blood vessels that form a visible latticework of red, blue, or purple surface veins.
But spider veins technically aren’t vein distortions; they’re damaged venules, arterioles, and capillaries — or the smaller circulatory vessels that connect to your larger veins.
But just like large varicose veins, these milder vascular contortions appear when a group of small surface vessels becomes abnormally swollen and distorted. In some cases, the tiny capillaries at the end of a dilated vein branch may even burst.
Why do spider veins develop?
Various factors can play a role in spider vein development, ranging from uncontrollable conditions like family history, female gender, and older age, to alterable circumstances like excess body weight, inactivity, and sun exposure.
While they can appear on any area of skin, most spider veins emerge in one of two places — the face (typically the nose or cheeks) or the lower extremities (often lower legs and/or feet).
Let’s take a closer look at how they develop in each area.
Nose and cheeks
Thin spider veins and broken capillaries often appear on the nose or cheeks as a result of too much sun exposure, which can readily damage these delicate vessels and cause them to swell and dilate.
Hot, humid weather, environmental irritants, alcohol consumption, and chronic skin conditions like rosacea can also give rise to facial spider veins.
Lower extremities
Lower extremity spider veins may emerge along your calf, shin, thigh, behind your knee, or on your foot. While they’re smaller, milder, and more superficial than larger varicose veins, they tend to develop in the same way: through vascular dysfunction and reduced circulation.
The larger veins in your lower extremities — and by extension, their smaller, supporting vessels — must work harder against gravity to keep blood flowing efficiently.
If a vessel’s internal valves are weakened by age, pregnancy hormones, excess weight, or something else, blood flow slows, and the surrounding vessel wall swells, dilates, and distorts.
Painless spider vein clearance
Most spider veins are painless and pose no threat to your health, but they can be quite conspicuous, especially if they form an extensive reticulation of red or blue lines across a sizable area of skin. Luckily, you don’t have to live with them.
There are two ways to erase spider veins:
Sclerotherapy
This conventional spider vein treatment involves injecting a chemical solution into the unwanted network of visible surface vessels. The ablative liquid irritates the lining of the targeted vessels, causing them to swell shut and fade away.
Laser therapy
While sclerotherapy can work wonders for spider vein clearance, we prefer to take a totally noninvasive, chemical-free approach to spider vein removal with laser therapy. At Fiamo Aesthetics, our team uses an advanced pulsed laser device to target unwanted spider veins with painless heat energy.
How does it work? When we pass the laser device over the treatment area, its thermal light waves penetrate the unwanted vessels, heating them from the inside out. This destabilizes the targeted vascular cells, causing the damaged vessels to contract, dissolve, and disappear.
Small spider veins often disappear immediately, while sprawling spider vein networks may take a few weeks to fade from view. It’s that simple.
Erase your spider veins today
Are you ready to say goodbye to unwanted spider veins for good? We can help. Call or click online to schedule a visit at Fiamo Aesthetics in Yakima, Washington, today.