You’ve probably heard of the Vampire Facial since it was made mainstream after Kim K uploaded a selfie of her face smudged in blood. The unorthodox treatment revolves around the idea of Platelet Rich Plasma Therapy, to allegedly radiant results.
Here’s the lowdown; a trained therapist extracts your blood, much like they would do during a blood test. The vial of blood is then put in a special centrifuge machine, where the platelets are separated out. The therapist then performs micro-needling techniques on your face to create micro-channels down into the base layers of your skin. After this, the concentrated blood platelets are re-applied topically, travelling deeper into the skin via the micro-channels in the hope that they will boost repair processes and heal damaged cells.
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Tonight on Kourtney & Kim Take Miami!!! #VampireFacial #kktm
A post shared by Kim Kardashian West(@kimkardashian) on Mar 10, 2013 at 6:14pm PDT
*Full disclosure, if you’re squeamish, stop reading now, ‘cos it’s about to get hella weird up in here.*
Having been talked through this laborious treatment process by a top cosmetic doctor, I came to the somewhat unusual conclusion that I could probably cut out the middle man and go it alone… “No thanks, I won’t be booking in for the treatment today, goodbye!” Little did that doctor know that I wasn’t scurrying off in a hurry because I was hemophobic, it was because I was going home to try it on myself. Yes, I was going to – somehow – extract my own blood and use it as a spot treatment.
Back at home, having thoroughly cleansed my skin, I sat there holding a sewing needle over a flame, feeling my chutzpah ebbing away by the second. Too far to turn back and determined to see it through, I let the needle cool off before gently(ish) prodding my fingertip. I squeezed my finger, milking it like a cow until a nice dollop of blood balled up at the top. I proceeded to apply the freshly extracted blood straight onto my breakouts and any other problem areas. Then I went to sleep.
I did this every other night for a week and I wish I could tell you it worked. Alas, I can’t.
Literally, nothing happened apart from my fingertip became a bit sore. And just when I thought I’d proved the industry wrong, showing up the vampire facial to be a load of rubbish, another doctor explained that the amount of platelets I would have obtained from a finger prick would have only been a minute percentage of the amount in an entire blood sample, let alone the fact the centrifuge separates them out to produce a concentrated hit that then is applied deep into the dermis via micro needling. In hindsight, I probably should have realised that beforehand. In reality, I did learn one valuable lesson – leave it to the pros.
Taken from GLAMOUR UK. Read the original here.
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