Using This Beauty Device for 5 Minutes Obliterated My Facial Puffiness

Photo: Stocksy / Sergey Filimonov
After a weekend spent imbibing, on Monday morning, I woke up and felt like my face was puffier than it usually is on Monday mornings. I'd like to hope that I'm not alone in discovering this, given that it 'tis the season for holiday parties and gatherings galore. And so, I frantically pored through my cabinet of beauty products, until I got my hands on a microcurrent device that's said to help with lymphatic drainage and squelch puffiness.

The Nuface Trinity ($325) is a handheld microcurrent facial device, known for sculpting and defining the contours of your face. "In the short term, microcurrent does work [to help reduce puffiness]," says Shirley Chi, MD, a San Francisco-based dermatologist. She explains that it causes muscle contractions that help your face to appear less puffy. Plus, it lifts facial features like cheeks and eyebrows, which can help you look more awake and ready to take on the day. See more about it from Dear Derm star Mona Gohara, MD:

It's legit: The Nuface has been FDA cleared to improve facial contouring, and so I put it to the test. I slid the device from the tip of my chin up towards my cheek, pausing at the topmost point of my cheekbone to help lift it. After a few minutes, I stopped and looked at the right side of my face compared to the left side, noting how much more lifted it looked. I followed on the other side and left my house feeling like I'd done some pretty stellar skin care for it being 8 a.m.

That said, Dr. Chi points out that microcurrent is not a long-term way to see results like this. For my purposes, using microcurrent to squelch morning bloat is fine, because Dr. Chi says that "the fluid will drain on its own later anyway." However, that lifting and toning will disappear over the course of the day. "In the long term, after a few hours the muscles will relax again and the results are gone," she says. "There's nothing long-lasting, but it's a good quick fix. You can't really get permanent muscle tightening or collagen stimulation with microcurrent." But still, for a morning I find myself in a pinch, I'll take it.

To figure out what to buy and what to skip, here are the best skin-care tools on the market, according to our dermatologist BFF. And this is the lowdown on microneedling your entire body

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