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DR. WILLIAM HEIMER: One of the most difficult problems that we have to treat in dermatology is melasma which is also called the mask of pregnancy, or chloasma, it's the browning of the cheek and the upper lip and the forehead, and oftentimes associated with either pregnancy or oral contraceptive use. And it really can be really quite unsightly and quite upsetting to patients. In a lot of ways, it's just as upsetting to us because we really want to help patients to make that go away. And up until now our treatment options have been pretty limited. We still can't absolutely promise everybody we can make all their melasma go away, but we are getting better and better at it.

One of the neat new advances has been the use of a hydrochronome peel and we have found that patients have responded to that better than a lot of other treatments, and it's really fun to be able to offer that in our clinic, and in appropriate guidelines and follow-ups, our patients have done extremely well.

The other advance we had recently is the fractionation of the CO2 laser, also know as the Active FX, and this can eliminate and break up some of the pigment in the more superficial melasma patients in a way that we've never been able to do safely with laser before. So these are two major advances that allow us to help our patients with melasma. Of course, there are great skin care regiments of all kinds of different that are beneficial that we can tailor-make for that patient's specific type of melasma to help them get the very best results.