What is a scar healing process? What are the best scar healing creams? Discover acne scar healing process and other types of scarring and the best scar healing cream out there in the market.
Accidents occur all the time due to clumsiness or just mishaps. When they happen you may be left nursing deep cuts, bruises or burns and when they finally heal you have to deal with yet another unsightly feature on your skin, a scar. Scars are the skin’s natural healing process, which takes place in various stages. While it is more difficult to erase an already formed scar, you can prevent one from being too visible by the way you handle your injury.
In a bid to help you understand the scar healing process, I will give you the stages your wound will have to go through in order to form a scar. During these stages you can make use of an anti scar cream and avoid an unsightly disfigurement on your skin. This is because repairing a scar can take a lot of time and if you do not have the patience, you may never achieve success with you efforts. What is the scar healing process, and which scar healing cream can be used in the process to prevent a scar from occurring in the first place? Find out shortly.
Scar Healing Process-Four Stages of Scar Formation
The moment you get injured from falling off your bike or by cutting yourself with a knife, you bleed profusely. The red blood cells in your blood react to the injury by clotting in order to stop the bleeding in a process known as hemostasis. That marks the first stage of scar healing process.
In the second stage known as the inflammatory, is marked by redness, swelling and tenderness as a scab begins to form. This stage begins 12 hours after the injury or skin trauma and may last for five days. Overlapping the second stage will be the proliferation stage, which begins a day after the injury and lasts for a week.
The proliferating stage in the scar healing process is marked by the formation of new skin tissue underneath the scab. Various skin cells combine with collagen to give support for a permanent scar tissue.
Finally, there is the maturation stage. In this step, the outer and inner layers of the skin begin to rebuild and remold into a final scar. This final and permanent scar may be red after two months and may remain raised for a full year. How long your wound lasts on these stages depend on your healing ability and the magnitude of your injury.
Stages of Scar Healing- When to Prevent a Prominent Scar
Since a scar is the skin’s natural way of correcting an injury, it is bound to appear. However, you can prevent it from being prominent by making use of scar reduction creams during the third and fourth stages of scar healing. This is when all the drainage on your wound has eased and the new scar tissue is forming. Therefore, you can use creams on the wound without interfering with the healing process.
Best Scar Healing Products
Of course the reduction of your scar will highly depend on the kind of products you use on the healing wound. The best scar healing products should not only be creams or lotions, but also patches that can apply pressure on the scar to prevent collagen from overgrowing and also provide the optimum temperature for the skin tissue to heal.
The healing products that can be used topically as creams and for applying pressure are those that are silicone based. Silicone has been proven to give excellent reduction on height, texture and discoloration on scars. As a result, using creams with silicone, and patches infused with it can give you the outcome you desire as your scar heals.
Scar Healing Cream with Silicone
Silicone based creams are the only ones that doctors, surgeons and dermatologists seem to approve of when it comes to the healing of scars. The science behind silicone gel is that it is easy to apply on the scar, and no one can see that you are using it because it is transparent.
It is self drying, transparent and needs no fixing. It takes about 4-5 minutes to dry. Once you apply you can go on to wear clothes or dressing without any problems. Although, what has been tested is a 100% pure silicone Gel, it is important to find out if the scar healing cream with silicone you wish to buy has this concentration. This is the only way, you can be sure of seeing improvement as your scar heals.
According to nih.gov, silicone gel in a test was found to reduce hypertrophic scars and keloids by 86% in texture, 68% in height and 84% in color. This is more than average. This makes it an effective treatment if you have a keloid or hypertrophic scar.
Furthermore, silicone gel can be used on both new and old scars with great success. What better time to use it than when your scar is still new?
There are so many creams containing the magical gel in the market, here are some of the renowned ones if you are looking for a scar healing cream with silicone:
- Biodermis silicone gel
- Cimeosil
- Hybrisil
- Kelo-cote
- Dermatix
- Acuscar
- Scar Away
- Healing Touch
- Scarguard
- ScarFx
- New Gel +E Advanced silicone gel
- Remescar
- Scarinex
- Scar Fade among others.
Best Scar Healing Cream-Other Brands without Silicone
Sometimes what has worked for you before on a scar may do it, yet again. Therefore, you do not have to limit yourself to healing your scar with only silicone based creams. There are several others made from natural ingredients and they have worked on many people without any problems.
If you must use best scar healing cream trusted by other sufferers like you, then using some of these scar creams would also be okay:
- Mederma
- InviCible
- Dr. Max Powers Serum
- Quantum Health Derma
How to Use Scar Healing Lotion Effectively
A cream or lotion may work to heal your scar. Some of the best lotions for scars include Palmers Cocoa Butter, pure cocoa butter or Bioskincare among others. You are supposed to squirt the lotion and massage it in circular motions while applying pressure on the scar. This way, you will make the scar heal without leaving a prominent disfigurement.
Natural Scar Healing and Scar Healing Remedies at Home
It is also possible to make use of natural scar healing ingredients derived from Mother Nature. Common scar healing remedies include using:
- fresh aloe vera gel
- olive oil
- Shea butter
- Calendula
- Vitamin E oil
- Primrose oil
- Shark liver
- Almond oil
There are no scientific studies to prove that these actually work, but people with scars have used them with success. Vitamin E oil on the other hand, is known to cause allergic reactions on some users, therefore, should you have itching or burning while using it, discontinue immediately.
Facial Scar Healing Treatment- When to Use
Using facial scar healing treatment should not be done when you have fresh breakouts. You should wait for the bout of acne to finish before you can use any scar creams on face. If you use any treatment for the scars when you still have pimples popping up, you could aggravate the acne and make it hard to treat it.
Acne Scar Healing Creams
It is important to choose creams meant for acne scar healing instead of going for general creams. This is because acne creams have specially been formulated for problematic oily skin. Therefore, they can address the problem while preventing fresh breakouts. Using all rounded scar removal creams may leave you with worse scars than you already have.
Here are acne scar specific products:
- Riiva Microderm
- Caudali Vimoperfect Radiance Serum
- La Roche Possay Mela-D pigment Control
- Dr. Deniss Gross Skin Care Alpha Beta Daily Face Peel
- Skin Medica Scar Recovery Gel
- L’Oreal Paris Youth Code Dark Spot Correcting& Illuminating Serum Corrector
- Neutrogena On-the-Spot Acne Treatment
- Neutrogena Advanced Solutions Acne Mark Fading Peel
- Garnier Nutritioniste Skin Renew Clinical Dark Spot Corrector