Arms, Body, Neck and Neckline

What is skin laxity? Who should we turn to in order to solve this problem?

di Bruno Bovani

Arms, Body, Neck and Neckline


For patients, it's an annoying blemish. For specialists, it’s a complex and delicate task. Treating skin laxity is one of the great challenges of aesthetic medicine.

After years in which the undisputed protagonist of aesthetic medicine treatments was the face, patients have acquired a greater awareness of their bodies. At the origin of this change is a need for psycho-physical well-being and the desire to feel good in one’s own skin, especially now that life expectancy has lengthened. Patients, both women and men, are no longer willing to live with imperfections and blemishes, but ask specialists for treatments and technological solutions that are increasingly innovative and effective.

What are the most popular body solutions for patients?

The priorities are about the same for everyone. Generally the first request is the removal of excess fat. Immediately after comes the rebalancing of shapes, lines and volumes in the points where the body appears most lacking: calves, buttocks, and of course the breasts for women. These are tasks that the specialist handles with a wise and synergistic use of liposuction and lipofilling.

The third request concerns skin imperfections. And one of the problems that emerge most insistently in this area is precisely laxity. For women the “soft and sagging tissue” is a real obsession and their only desire is to make it disappear.

What is laxity?

By laxity we mean the progressive loss of tone of the superficial tissues. It is a phenomenon related to the depletion of collagen and the drastic decrease in tissue firmness, determined by the loosening of elastic fibers. The reasons are generally multiple: heavy weight loss, unbalanced diets, the physiological aging of tissues, genetic predisposition, pregnancies. The most common areas treated for skin laxity are the inner arms, abdomen, knees, inner thighs, buttocks.

Why is laxity among the most complex blemishes to treat?

Regenerating tissue, whether to counteract aging or to repair damage from a bad lifestyle, is a very complex process. It is not simply a matter of removing something that is in excess, as is the case with the elimination of an accumulation of fat. But rather activating the body to self-regenerate. And to stimulate the production of new collagen fibers (neocollagenesis) and new elastic fibers requires innovative approaches and new technological tools, on which the biomedical sector is now focusing most of its efforts.

Which specialist is best to refer to?

For the characteristics that I have indicated, the treatment of skin laxity falls within the scope of Tissue Regenerative Medicine, which is one of the most innovative and stimulating branches of modern medicine. But there are several specialists to whom you can turn: plastic surgeons, dermatologists and aesthetic doctors. Each, according to their skills is able to propose useful and innovative treatments. Keeping constantly updated, because research offers new solutions every day.