Gwyneth Paltrow may be 40, but she looks close to 25 on the cover of May’s Harper’s Bazaar.
How does she do it? The actress-turned-mother-turned-wellness-guru is not a fan of Botox, but she does dabble in laser skin resurfacing, according to media reports.
“I won’t do Botox again, because I looked crazy. I looked like Joan Rivers,” Paltrow told the magazine. When it comes to lasers, it’s no pain, no gain for Paltrow. “It’s quite painful. It feels like someone’s smacking your face with a rubberband that has an electric shock in it. But I would do it again, because I feel like it took five years off my face.”
She is not alone, says Joshua Zeichner, MD, the Director of Cosmetic and Clinical Research at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He doesn’t treat Paltrow, but he does do a lot of laser skin resurfacing on his patients. And with good reason — it works. “Laser skin resurfacing helps even skin tone, texture, appearance of pores, and can even combat sun-damaged skin susceptible to skin cancer,” he says. “The newest lasers use fractionated technology, which minimizes downtime while providing great results. While we can’t turn back time to avoid the sun we’ve been exposed to in the past, laser resurfacing can help undo that damage.”