Injectables offer a quick fix to turn back the clock. There are three basic kinds of injections: wrinkle removers, sweat stoppers, and volume fillers. A relatively painless poke of Botox or Dysport just under the skin works wonders, almost as soon as the needle slips out. Crow’s feet stop treading, bar codes blazed across the forehead vanish, and those angry furrows between the eyebrows turn friendly.

A few drops of Botox can also dry up sweat glands that tend to gush at the wrong moments. Who might want to completely dam up a sweaty upper lip or armpit? Both men and women. Photographers fearing for their lenses, models on the catwalk, women who don’t want their makeup smearing, and business types are all potential clients.

Originally, Botox was used to stop muscle spasms and twitchings. Botulotoxin A does this by temporarily inhibiting nerve signals; strained muscles stop contracting and freeze into their natural positions. It’s a non-invasive procedure, unlike the cuts and scars of plastic surgery. The minor bruises and swollen red skin caused by the needle usually disappear in a few days.

As people get older, collagen in the skin, the elastic stuff of youth, naturally reduces. Enter silicon oil to the rescue. Bio-Alcamid can fill out an unwanted dent or hollow, a jaw line or a thin lip. The injected molecules act like a scaffolding around which collagen and new skin cells can bind.

Basking one’s face a few times in front of a harmless array of tiny bright yellow lights, combined with a well applied chemical peel, is another way to leave the face looking fresh and smooth.

Social gatherings introducing such aesthetic techniques are a bit like the Tupperware parties of the 1970s. Clients can nibble on sugar cookies, listen to classical music, and socialize while checking out their own digital photos with the projected beauty changes (it’s a little like looking at your own Portrait of Dorian Gray in reverse). Doctors, meanwhile, zap the imperfections out of the willing in another room.

Treatment in Prague costs significantly less than it would cost in New York or London. There are dozens of specialty clinics or dermatologists in clinics in the city, ready to do the job.

But, alas, the miracle effects fade and the wrinkles relentlessly creep back. The Botox effects last three to six months while the filler gels last longer – anywhere from one to five years.

The good thing is if you don’t like the results, just wait a while. The bad thing is if you really do like them, and most do, the costs will continue to add up. A complete smoothing or shaping of a specific area can run anywhere from CZK 5,000 to 10,000.

In addition to financial factors, doctors in the United States also warn about the vicious circle of costly narcissism – also known as surgical addiction – that can develop, as well as the dangers of receiving jabs in the wrong spots from unskilled practitioners.

Wrinkles, along with white hair, are usually the first signs of aging most of us notice, usually somewhere in our early or mid 30s. But when it comes to wrinkles, you have a wider choice of products and procedures than with any other cosmetic process.

The skin does not lose its youthfulness overnight but has many enemies that wear it down over the course of time. By knowing what causes wrinkles you can take steps to delay or even reverse some of these effects. With age, skin loses its elasticity, begins to thin, and the underlying vascular composition and tissue structures become more visible on the surface. The output of the sweat and oil glands slowly declines, which contributes to moisture loss. This in turn increases the possibility of irritation, and the skin also becomes more vulnerable to injury. Healing times are also increased.

The most common causes of wrinkles include smoking, excessive sun exposure, heredity, alcohol, and diet. There are many things you can do to delay the aging process, many of them quite simple and relatively cheap, and they can even be quite beneficial to your overall health. A change of diet, especially including foods rich in vitamins A,B, C and E, will help slow the aging process. Quenching your thirst with plain water instead of caffeine-based drinks such as coffee, tea, and soft drinks will keep your skin and body hydrated and skin moisture balanced. Rest and exercise is also very important in keeping skin looking taut and healthy.

Wearing protective clothing, including a hat and suntan lotion and sunblock, can work wonders. Keeping alcohol consumption to a minimum and not smoking go a long way towards keeping those unwanted lines at bay.

If these steps aren’t enough to slow down the aging process and you’d like to get rid of or smooth out some wrinkles around your eyes and forehead, there are quite a number of options available. Creams, lotions, and potions aside, there is a whole array of different types of procedures to help smooth out those fine lines. Here is a shortlist of some of the more popular ones:

• Botox – Injections are a short-term treatment for fine lines and wrinkles on the face. Botox is most commonly used to treat frown lines, laugh lines, crow’s feet, and forehead wrinkles – it works by relaxing the muscles and thus making the lines disappear. It lasts from 3 to 6 months and can be repeated. Botox is a protein toxin produced by a bacterium. Because it is injected in extremely small amounts, its effects remain localized. It has very few side effects.
• Collagen – This natural protein keeps skin moisturized and elastic. Injectable bovine collagen has been in use for over a quarter of a century. It is mainly used to soften lines around the mouth and sometimes also to increase the size of the lips. Another popular use is to erase acne scars. This is also a temporary treatment, lasting from 3 to 4 months. Some people are allergic to bovine collagen and thus skin tests must be carried out before it is injected.
• Fat – Definitely for the not-so-queasy, in this procedure your own fat is removed, via tumescent liposuction,  usually from the thighs, stomach, or the buttocks, and is then used as a wrinkle filler. As with most treatments it is not permanent, because facial subcutaneous fat loss is a natural part of the aging process. With this process there are no threats of allergic reactions.
• Hyaluronic Acid – Often referred to as Restylane, this is a basic and naturally occurring substance in the human skin. It is also injected and is ideal in treating larger folds of skin around the mouth and the cheeks. Its effects last from 6 to 9 months and allergic reactions are rare, though it is not recommended to be used by people who have taken any type of blood medication in the previous 5 years.

So the next time you look in the mirror and you begin to notice a few unwanted lines creeping in, rest assured, a quick, relatively painless, and cheap solution is right around the corner waiting for you, at the many Prague cosmetics shops and skin clinics.

During laser treatment for acne, a perfect balance is created between the controlled cooling of the outer layer of the skin (the epidermis) and the precision heating of the upper layer of the denser, inside layer of skin (the dermis). This treatment quickly and effectively calms down the over-enthusiastic activity of the sebaceous (oil) glands to reduce acne, and can also be used to treat post-acne scars without invasive surgery. Best of all, the results are visible after the first treatment.

The little miracle of light can also be used to smooth wrinkles. Here, it works in a way similar to the treatment for acne scars – the heat from the laser disintegrates old, damaged collagen fibers below the skin. New, flexible fibers begin to form during the following weeks, and both wrinkles and post-acne scars begin to smooth themselves out.

Lasers have a further use. Today, they’re rapidly replacing the old resurfacing techniques of grinding or “sanding” the upper layer of the skin. Now, thanks to laser treatments, you can shave off as many as ten or more years from the appearance of your skin, in only a few weeks. Best of all, it’s not necessarily true that recovery from resurfacing always requires a long period under bandages or with reddened skin. Today, doctors can set the length of the laser pulse to be aggressive, where needed; but also very gentle, so that improvements can be made in small steps stretched over several appointments, thereby requiring only a “lunch break” recovery period of a few hours to a couple of days at most.

The newest variation to hit the Czech Republic is fractionalization, or using very fine material, invisible to the naked eye, which is projected into the surface of the skin, working just the same way as the old grinding technique of resurfacing. Because this new material is so fine, healing takes only about a day. The treatment can be repeated a few times, so you can achieve the same result as with the more aggressive resurfacing which is usually done under anesthesia and may require a healing period of several weeks.

So if you’ve been thinking about improving the tone and quality of your skin, removing wrinkles, or erasing acne and its scars, now it’s an even better time to ask a doctor about the latest laser skin treatments. Let that little light shine!