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Skin Clinic and Dermatological Services

28/10/2026

Clearer, smoother skin: the complete gold microneedling treatment, start to finish.

Different skin. Same objective. Here's your chance to indulge in the full system at no extra cost.

Everyone wants their own skin problem solved. That’s what a system can do that a single treatment can’t: adapt to your skin while working towards one goal, which is to correct what’s happening in it.

Regenerative facial rejuvenation

This is a full system built on regenerative facial rejuvenation. It uses your body’s natural biological processes, such as collagen production, cell signalling and tissue repair, to restore skin quality, not just fill or freeze lines.

It isn’t only for ageing. With the right infusion and peel for your skin, the same repair process helps treat acne, soften scarring and even out pigmentation.

Your facial anatomy doesn’t change, but your tissue quality does. I’m not changing your identity. I’m restoring healthy biology: structural regeneration, from the inside out.

Five stages: the treatment, plus $384 of free extras

- Preparation: your skin is assessed and prepared

- Microneedling procedure: Dermapen microneedling, face, neck and décolleté ($449)

Treatment upgrades:

- Targeted infusion (MesoGlide), matched to your concern (Worth $50). Choose from MG-CLR (acne and congestion), MG-BL (pigmentation), MG-R.A.S. (ageing and scarring), MG-HA35+ (ageing) or MG-HA35 (hydration).

- Über Pro Peel (Worth $50) or Uber MD (Worth $50)

- Post-procedure: Dermalux LED to support healing (Worth $75)

- Home prescription: DP Dermaceuticals starter kit, about four to six weeks of home care (Worth $209). Choose from Brightening (for pigmentation), Anti-Ageing, Problematic Skin (for acne) or Essentials (for extra hyaluronic acid).

Everything you need, nothing you don’t. Available November only, which gives your skin time to settle before Christmas.

How the complete system works

Microneedling tells your skin it needs to repair. My job is to make sure the repair crew has everything it needs.

To change, your skin cells need two things: a signal to start repairing, and the building blocks to do the work. This package gives you both in one session:

- Microneedling: a physical signal. Fine channels trigger growth factors and new collagen and elastin.

- MesoGlide: the building blocks. How do we deliver regenerative molecules accurately? We needle them in, through the open channels, while your cells are most active. They reach far deeper than anything applied to the surface.

- Anabolic peel: a chemical signal, applied through the channels. Its acids and retinaldehyde renew the surface and work on pigment and breakouts.

- Dermalux LED: red and near-infrared light that calms your skin and supports recovery.

- Home care: four to six weeks of DP Dermaceuticals to keep the repair going between sessions.

Microneedling turns the soil. The infusion feeds it. Home care keeps it growing.

Treatments that work in harmony

Don’t focus on one treatment. These steps work in harmony, each one supporting the next. One instrument can play a tune, but it takes the whole orchestra to make the music.

Each microneedling treatment is guided by your skin as it presents on the day, but every one pursues the same objective.

That’s why it works best as a series. Treatments are stacked at intervals that let the bio-stimulators have time to work. Every treatment becomes more meaningful. Every patient achieves a more harmonious outcome.

As a Gold Dermapenworld Authorised Treatment Provider, this applies the full Dermapen system: the treatment, the upgrades and the home care, designed to work together.

What to expect

It looks dramatic and feels like sandpaper. Then the repair crew gets to work.

- Days 1–5: redness and warmth, like mild sunburn

- Weeks 1–3: new collagen and skin cells start forming beneath the surface

- From 6–12 weeks: visible change usually shows, and it keeps improving for months

If you’d like to keep going after November, microneedling is part of my Intensive Programme: one hour a month, with treatment chosen for your skin on the day.

Book here: https://bookings.gettimely.com/medacare/bb/book

Treatment, not trends. Medacare: real answers for difficult skin.

28/10/2026

Over the last few weeks, several clients have brought their collagen tubs into clinic, all asking the same thing: “Is this one any good?”

You’ve probably stood in the aisle wondering the same. Collagen isn’t cheap, and every tub makes the same promise.

Your body can’t absorb collagen whole because it’s far too big. It’s like a flat-pack wardrobe. It only fits through the door once it’s in pieces. That’s why collagen powders are hydrolysed, which means cut into small pieces called peptides.

Almost every tub on the shelf is made this way, so “small” on a label doesn’t tell you much. Your gut breaks the pieces down again anyway. Most become basic amino acids, but a few short peptides survive and reach your bloodstream. Research suggests these act as a message to your fibroblasts, the cells that build your skin’s support structure: collagen for strength, elastin for bounce, and hyaluronic acid for hydration.

Which messages survive depends on which peptides were in the powder to begin with.

In simple terms, you can shred a shopping list and a love letter into pieces of the same size. Size isn’t what matters. It’s what’s written on the pieces.

Verisol is a specific peptide blend, made by Gelita for skin. In placebo-controlled trials, 2.5 g a day for eight weeks improved skin elasticity. In one study it also reduced wrinkle volume around the eyes and increased collagen and elastin production in the skin.

A generic tub is a box of mixed keys. Verisol is a key cut for the lock and actually tried in it.

I’ve seen it work well in clinic, and that’s why it’s the one I use.

When you read a label, look for:

Verisol named on the label, not just “collagen peptides”
2.5 g of it per day and take it for 8–12 weeks of use before you judge the results.

If you’d like to start on Verisol, I recommend Orthoplex Collagen Clinical. One scoop gives you the full 2.5 g of Verisol, plus three other Gelita peptides, each developed for a different kind of connective tissue:

- Fortigel (5 g): joint cartilage
- Fortibone (5 g): bone density, particularly after menopause
- Tendoforte (5 g): tendons and ligaments

It also includes 100 mg of vitamin C, which your body needs to build collagen.

It’s a practitioner-only product, so you won’t find it on supermarket or pharmacy shelves, but I keep it in stock at the clinic. You can book a product purchase appointment, or just pop in.

Lee

27/10/2026

This week I read a paper that made me pause and pay more attention.

It was about taurine. I recommend it often, for mood, metabolism and skin, and this research helps explain part of why it may help.

If your skin goes red, hot and reactive at the slightest thing (a stressful week, a bad night’s sleep, a sugary weekend), you know how exhausting it is to feel like your body overreacts to everything. Part of what’s going on is an alarm system that has become too easy to set off.

Inside your immune cells is a structure called the NLRP3 inflammasome. In simple terms, it’s a smoke alarm. When it senses danger, it assembles and releases a signal called IL-1β, which calls in inflammation. That’s useful when there’s a real fire. It’s not useful when it goes off every time you make toast. Research has linked overactive NLRP3 to acne, rosacea and psoriasis.

For over a decade, scientists believed the main trigger for this alarm was potassium leaking out of the cell (Muñoz-Planillo and colleagues, 2013).

Recently, a team at Yale published something new in the journal Cell (Guan and colleagues, 2026). They found that the same danger signals also make taurine leak out of immune cells, and that this happens separately from potassium. When taurine stays inside the cell, the alarm is much harder to assemble. When taurine levels drop, the alarm goes off more easily.

When danger hits, taurine is the sandbags at the door. Once they’re dragged away, the water gets in.

In older mice, raising taurine lowered age-related inflammation and improved their overall health. One honest caveat: this is mostly cell and animal research. We don’t yet have human trials showing that taurine calms inflammatory skin conditions. But the mechanism is clear, and it fits what I’ve seen in clinic.

Taurine does more than calm inflammation

- It’s one of the most abundant free amino acids inside your cells, especially in your heart, brain, eyes and muscles.

- It helps cells hold onto water and stay stable under stress, including skin cells exposed to UV.

- It acts on the same calming receptors in the brain as GABA. That’s well established in the lab, but research on mood in people is still early.

- In human trials, taurine supplements have produced modest improvements in blood pressure, blood sugar and triglycerides.

A myth worth correcting: taurine is not what gives energy drinks their buzz. That’s the caffeine and sugar. Taurine is closer to the opposite: a steadying molecule.

Where you get it

- Your body makes some taurine itself, but much of it comes from food: shellfish (mussels and scallops are among the richest sources), fish, and the dark meat of chicken and turkey.

- Plant foods contain almost none, so if you eat little or no animal food, your intake is likely to be low.

Food or supplement?

Food is a good foundation, but the amounts are small. A typical diet provides somewhere between 40 and 400 mg of taurine a day. Human studies on health improvement have used 1 to 3 grams a day, and sometimes more. That’s up to ten times what even a seafood-heavy diet gives you.

In simple terms, food keeps the sandbags topped up. When your skin is already inflamed, food alone may not be enough to get you to the levels studied.

- At up to 3 g a day, taurine has a good long-term safety record in human research.

- It takes time. Think of it as topping the sandbags back up: they’re filled one bag at a time, not all at once. Most studies run for 8 to 12 weeks to make a real difference, so give it that long.

If you’d like to try taurine as a supplement, pop in for a free 10-minute product consultation. I’ll check it’s right for you and help you get started.

Taurine isn’t an off switch, it’s a dimmer: it helps turn an overeager alarm back down to where it should be. Working out what your body needs isn’t something you have to do on your own.

Lee

21/10/2026

Great skin is a habit before it's a result

Every day, you get to vote for the skin you want.

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, describes every action as a vote for the person you're becoming. Think of one push-up: it doesn't change your body, but it's a vote for "I'm someone who trains." Skin works the same way:

- Your serum tonight is a vote for a calmer, stronger barrier.

- Your sunscreen this morning is a vote for keeping the pigment we've cleared.

- Keeping your treatment appointment is a vote for the collagen we're building.

- Taking your supplements is a vote for repair from the inside.

Some votes are big. A single IPL session can lift years of sun spots. Most are small. Together, they add up.

Why it takes time:

- Cell populations turn over slowly. Your outer skin renews over roughly four to six weeks, and longer as we get older, so today's care shows up next month, not tomorrow.

- To change the tissue's overall expression profile, you have to replace and re-educate cells over several cycles.

- Hormesis works by repetition. LED acts as a controlled, low-grade stressor. Adaptation, such as better repair capacity and lower chronic inflammatory signalling, builds with repeated doses, the same way exercise training does.

- With microneedling, each session starts a wound-healing cycle that runs about 4–6 weeks: inflammation, then proliferation, then remodelling. New collagen from microneedling keeps remodelling for months after each session, and builds up over several cycles.

- With IPL, visible targets clear in stages. Each session clears only part of the vessels and pigment. As the chronic photodamage load drops, the inflammatory and oxidative stress signals driving the aged expression pattern drop too.

- A damaged barrier repairs best with steady support. It can't be rushed, and stop-start care keeps setting it back.

You won't always notice the single votes, but over time, you'll see the count.

The threshold:

At some point, it stops being a routine you have to remember and becomes how you look after yourself. You're no longer someone trying to fix your skin; you're someone who takes care of it.

If you've slipped, you haven't lost your progress. Just cast the next vote.

Lee

25/09/2026

Getting rid of the baseball doesn't fix the broken window.

Ten words from Cogence Immunology that say what I've spent years trying to explain to clients with science. Sometimes one simple picture does what pages of research can't.

Finding the problem and fixing the damage are two different jobs.

My focus has turned to this the past few weeks because I'm living that right now. My surgery fixed the problem, but my body is still healing and will be for some time. I'm in the next phase, and it needs its own care. I must now support repair.

I see this in clinic too. You finally work out the cause and remove it, and for many, skin responds well. For some, though, progress is slower, and it's natural to start wondering what's still wrong.

To understand why progress can go slow or even stall, I want to introduce you to research that has shaped how I think about healing. Robert Naviaux, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, describes what he calls the cell danger response.

When your cells sense a threat, whether an irritant, an infection or ongoing stress, they switch out of everyday mode and into defence. Naviaux describes the mitochondria, the energy centres of your cells, as threat detectors. When they sense danger, they switch from making energy to defending the cell. In simple terms, it's often described as your cells turning from powerplants into battleships. Battleships are built to fight, not rebuild. They're great in a crisis, but you can't rebuild a town while they're still firing. Stressed cells also release ATP, normally their energy currency, outside the cell, where it becomes an alarm signal to their neighbours.

In his 2018 paper on the healing cycle, Naviaux sets out three stages that need to happen in order:

CDR1 is damage control: inflammation, defence and clean-up.

CDR2 is rebuilding: new cells are made to replace the ones that were lost.

CDR3 is reconnection: the new cells mature, take on their proper roles and start working with their neighbours again. Only then does the alarm signal quieten.

Here's the part that matters for your skin. Removing the trigger ends the threat, but it doesn't complete the cycle. Naviaux proposes that when tissue is injured again before healing finishes, incomplete cycles stack up, and cells can be left stuck partway through. The danger has passed, but the alarm keeps sounding. He suggests this incomplete healing may sit underneath many chronic conditions.

Healing moves through stages: inflammation, rebuilding, then remodelling.

That's the broken window. Your cells may still be finishing a cycle that the trigger started. And each stage needs its own support, because what helps skin calm down isn't the same as what helps it rebuild.

So if you've found your cause and your skin hasn't caught up yet, you haven't failed. You're in the next phase.

Healing the window is the phase I'm in now. After surgery like mine, the first six to eight weeks are a huge task for the body. Believe it or not, I'll still be healing in six to twelve months, and sometimes for some people even longer. That's a pace my body sets, not me. My job is to support it, so each stage can finish properly and I'm not left carrying problems forward. Your skin deserves that same patience. It isn't failing. It's still healing.

This is the part of my work I love most. When a client finally understands why their skin is doing what it's doing, something changes. Their shoulders drop. They stop blaming themselves. Their skin hasn't changed yet, but they have. They're not guessing anymore.

Understanding doesn't fix everything on its own. But it turns something that happens to you into something you can work with.

Lee

24/09/2026

If cortisol calms inflammation, why does stress make your skin worse?

This is a question I get asked in clinic more often than you'd think, and it's a fair one. On paper, it doesn't add up.

Your skin runs its own local stress system, and under stress, its barrier repairs more slowly. Researchers saw this in students during exam time. But it still leaves the cortisol puzzle, which I want to explain here.

We know cortisol works by docking onto receptors inside your cells, called glucocorticoid receptors. Once it docks, inflammation gets turned down. But the signal only works if the cell is listening.

Research suggests that when stress and inflammation go on for weeks or months, cells can start listening less. They may make fewer of the receptors that respond to cortisol, and more of a version that gets in the way. This has been studied most in asthma, where it helps explain why some people respond poorly to steroids. The skin research is at an earlier stage, but I think it fits something many of you will recognise: the stress has passed, and your skin still hasn't caught up.

In simple terms, it's like living beside a busy road for so long you've put earplugs in. The traffic hasn't stopped. You've just stopped hearing it.

The good news is that receptors aren't fixed. The number a cell makes shifts with what's going on around it, and one thing that may help is vitamin D.

Early research, mostly in cells, suggests vitamin D helps cells make more of the receptors that respond to cortisol. In people with eczema, a few small trials found vitamin D supplements helped, especially in winter and in people who were low to start with.

After a long southern winter, plenty of us are low without knowing it. So if your skin has been slow to settle, it's worth considering vitamin D supplementation.

For most people, ordinary vitamin D3 does the job. But D3 relies on bile to be absorbed and on your liver to convert it into the form your body stores. If you have a condition that affects fat absorption, such as coeliac or Crohn's disease, or one that affects your liver or bile flow, less of it may get through. There's another form that has already been through the liver's step and is absorbed more easily, even when fat absorption isn't working well. If you need this form contact me to see if it would suit you.

Vitamin D also needs support to work. Your body uses magnesium to convert it, so make sure your diet includes magnesium-rich foods like leafy greens, nuts, seeds and wholegrains. You'll also often see vitamin D sold with K2. There's a sensible reason behind the pairing, but the evidence that most people need it is still thin. If you're on warfarin, talk to your doctor before taking any vitamin K.

You might now wonder whether this is why inflammatory skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis are often better in summer. Vitamin D is only part of the picture. UV light from the sun also calms the immune activity in your skin directly. That's why phototherapy is a proven treatment for several inflammatory skin conditions. Time outside also helps your sleep and stress levels, which brings us back to cortisol. So this is your cue to get outdoors more, not just take a supplement. Over winter, we spend so much time inside that we become "outside deficient." Just remember our UV can be strong so don't let your skin burn.

Now you know part of why your skin can take longer to settle than you'd expect. A slow recovery after a hard stretch doesn't mean nothing is working. It often means your cells are still turning the volume back up. Your skin has been in a noisy place for a while, and it takes time to take the earplugs out. Be patient with it, give it the right support, and it can start listening again.

Lee

24/09/2026

Korean Skincare, Honestly: What the label means and what PDRN can really do.

If you've been looking at skincare lately, you've probably noticed that "Korean" has become a selling point in its own right. Nobody specifically goes shopping for American skincare or Australian skincare, so why Korean?

Part of the answer is very clever branding. K-beauty grew alongside K-pop and K-dramas, with real government and industry backing, and many brands are made by a handful of large manufacturers. So "Korean" on the label tells you where a product was made, not whether it works. And when every ingredient is sold as the next big thing, it's hard to know what's real.

Some of it holds up. Korean sunscreens use newer UV filters and are lovely to wear, though some have tested below their labelled SPF. Centella has great evidence for calming irritated skin but its already used in brands all around the world. Korea didn't discover Centella, they popularised it. Exosomes are showing real promise alongside in-clinic treatments. Snail mucin and rice water have far less human research behind them.

Then there's PDRN, often sold as "salmon DNA," and one of the things I'm asked about most right now. It sits somewhere in the middle, so let's take a closer look.

Here's what we know. PDRN is made of fragments of DNA. Injected into skin, it has a genuine research history in wound healing, much of it from Italian and Korean research groups. Research suggests it works less by supplying building material and more by sending a signal. In simple terms, it doesn't deliver the bricks. It rings the doorbell to call the builders.

The catch is getting it in. Your skin barrier is designed to keep large molecules out, and DNA fragments are large. Putting them on the surface and expecting them to reach the cells that repair your skin is a bit like trying to post a sofa through a letterbox. Even the brands making it agree. British company Medik8 has taken a different approach, making its PDRN from microorganisms instead of salmon and folding it into a tiny pyramid shape designed to slip through. It's a clever idea, and interestingly it isn't Korean at all. The published research on this kind of structure is still mostly lab and animal work. Medik8 has run its own human studies, but they test the whole serum, which also contains exosomes and other actives, so we can't yet say how much is down to the PDRN.

One route with more promise is combining it with microneedling, which creates tiny channels so it doesn't have to squeeze through the letterbox at all. Early studies are encouraging, though still small. One caution: only products made and sterilised for that purpose should go on skin during microneedling. Your home serum isn't one of them.

So if you're weighing up a PDRN serum, it doesn't need to come from Korea. And the most useful question isn't "is PDRN good?" It's "can it get where it needs to go?"

Lee

24/09/2026

The Rise in Inflammatory Skin Conditions

Recovering from surgery has gifted me some extra time to study the skin, deeply as always. One question keeps pulling me back: why are so many more people living with inflamed, reactive skin?

If that's you, you'll know the pattern. The worst week arrives, with a deadline or a sick child, and right on cue, your skin flares. It can feel like your skin is letting you down, or that if you coped better, it wouldn't happen. Neither is true.

There's no single reason for the rise, but one piece I keep returning to is stress. Neuroscientist Claudia Aguirre, in her talk "The Hidden Brain in Your Skin," puts it simply: your skin carries much of the same machinery as your brain.

Your brain runs a stress system called the HPA axis, the chain of signals that ends in cortisol. Researchers, notably Andrzej Slominski, have found your skin runs its own local version. In simple terms, your skin isn't just taking orders from headquarters. It's an outpost with its own stress department.

That has consequences. When researchers studied students during exams, their skin barrier took longer to repair (Garg and colleagues, 2001). Stress slows the repair crew. So a flare in a hard week isn't weakness. It's your skin doing what it's built to do.

Here's what helps: treat a stressful week like a southerly on the forecast. You bring the washing in before the rain, not after.

When you see a hard week coming:

1. Make sure the right skincare is in place.

2. Write it down. Researchers at the University of Auckland asked people to write about something that had upset them, 20 minutes a day for three days, before a small skin wound was made. Their skin healed faster than that of people who wrote about their daily plans. A second Auckland study, with 122 adults, found the same. Research suggests that getting it out of your head and onto paper reaches your skin's repair crew too.

If your skin has been struggling for a while, you can take this further. In both studies, people wrote about the most upsetting experience of their life, not just a stressful week. If that brings up more than you expected, talk to someone you trust.

We don't know why writing helps. The obvious guess is that it lowers stress, which lowers cortisol, which frees up repair. That's plausible, but I'm drawn to James Pennebaker's explanation who developed expressive writing. Turning a jumble of feelings into a story seems to reduce rumination, the mental loop that keeps the stress response running in the background.

In simple terms: we know stress slows the repair crew, and we have good early evidence that writing gets it moving again. We just don't know the exact route yet. In this case we don't really even need to know how, just that it helps and is pretty well proven.

The main thing is, your skin isn't something you have to figure out by yourself. You don't need to know everything. You just need to know the difference between what's misleading and what's meaningful, and that's where I can help.

16/09/2026

Thank you to everyone who has been so understanding and patient while the clinic has been closed this past week.

I've had unexpected emergency surgery and am currently recovering.

I'll be back seeing clients from the week of the 29th, subject to how recovery goes, starting with fewer appointments each day while my strength and energy return, then building back up to normal from there.

Until then I'm available by email.

For product purchases, email me at [email protected] and I'll organise your order, send an invoice you can pay online, and leave it ready for collection.

Thank you for your patience — I'm looking forward to seeing you all again soon.

Lee

06/08/2026

Most people are told rosacea is a surface problem — a skin condition to be managed with creams and lasers. That's part of it. But it's not the whole picture, and the part that gets missed is what's happening underneath.

Rosacea and disordered cholesterol travel together. In a study of over 50,000 people, those with rosacea had significantly higher rates of dyslipidaemia — raised total cholesterol, LDL and triglycerides. That's not a coincidence. The two conditions share the same underlying machinery.

Heres where they meet:

Oxidised LDL feeds skin inflammation. When LDL is elevated, some of it oxidises. Oxidised LDL activates the same family of innate-immune receptors (TLRs) that sit at the top of rosacea's core inflammatory cascade — the KLK5 / LL-37 pathway that drives your redness. A signal from your bloodstream can plug straight into the pathway behind your flushing.

It triggers mast cell degranulation. Mast cells in rosacea-affected skin are already primed and reactive. Oxidised LDL is one of the signals that makes them degranulate — releasing histamine, which drives flushing and erythema, and VEGF, which drives the growth of new fragile blood vessels. That's the visible telangiectasia. This is core rosacea biology.

Triglycerides raise IGF-1, which raises skin sensitivity. Raised triglycerides — often from frequent refined-carbohydrate intake — push up insulin and IGF-1. IGF-1 appears to increase the density of TRPV1 receptors, the skin's hypersensitivity and "flush" receptor. More receptors means more reactivity.

Your barrier depends on the right fats. The skin's protective barrier relies on a specific lipid composition, including oleic acid — a natural TRPV1 antagonist that holds that hypersensitivity receptor in a closed, calm state. When whole-body lipid metabolism is disordered, that balance shifts and the barrier becomes more reactive and more permeable.

It shifts the environment in favour of Demodex. The fat composition of your oil glands is shaped by systemic lipid metabolism. Changes there can make the skin a more hospitable home for Demodex mites — a recognised driver of papulopustular rosacea.

Both run through NF-κB — the same master switch. Disordered lipids and rosacea independently switch on NF-κB, the master inflammatory regulator behind IL-6 and TNF-alpha. When both are active at once, the inflammatory load compounds. This is often why rosacea turns stubborn and stops responding to topical treatment alone — there's a systemic input that creams simply can't reach.

In treatment, IPL clears existing vessels beautifully. But while these inflammatory and vascular drivers stay active, the skin has a standing reason to generate new ones. Treating the whole picture — not just the surface — is what helps the outcome hold.

This is the difference between managing rosacea and understanding it. Medacare assess's the system, not just the skin.

Real answers for difficult skin.

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