Have you ever thought that trimming fat could be a lot more fun than spending months at the gym, doing obscure exercises that only trim a little bit of it? Well, with treatments like Coolsculpting and Kybella, you very well can. These are powerhouses when it comes to melting through fat and toning different areas of the body.
Opposites, But With Similar Results
Both Kybella and Coolsculpting are designed to melt through the fat cell buildup on various parts of the body. These treatments are perfect for anyone looking to tone down the fat and gain control over how their body looks. This makes them very powerful and useful tools in the hands of a cosmetic surgeon, especially one with a lot of experience in body contouring.
But even though both treatments are designed to do more or less the same thing, their methodologies are completely different.
First, you have Coolsculpting, which like the name implies, uses the cool air to tone the body. By applying pressurized cold air against the skin, the fat cells are stimulated into destroying themselves from the inside and letting the body naturally dispose of them. What essentially ends up happening, is the fat cells destroy themselves through completely natural means, detach from the rest of the fat clump, leaving that area with a thinner layer of fat.
This not only makes the Coolsculpting treatment one that relies on your body’s own natural abilities, but it also means that there are no side effects, no odd reactions to questionable chemicals, no scars and no injections. The procedure is purely non-invasive since the Coolsculpting pumps are placed on the outside of your skin as they pump cold air. Another great aspect of the Coolsculpting treatment is that it also doesn’t hurt.
Most cosmetic treatments, though pretty much mostly painless, do end up causing some amount of discomfort and tiny amounts of pain. Coolsculpting, however, is not the same. Within the first 7 to 10 minutes that the Coolsculpting pumps are pressed against your body, the skin goes numb from the cold and you don’t feel a thing all throughout the treatment. Even with skin that’s sensitive to the cold, you’ll still find very little to complain about Coolsculpting.
Kybella, on the other hand, works in the opposite direction. Instead of using the cold to convince the fat cells into killing themselves, it just directly gets rid of them with the special compound injected into the fatty areas of the body. The compound is actually a synthetic variant of a stomach acid which is naturally created inside your body. This is the deoxycholic acid and it specializes in burning through fat cells specifically. In your stomach, it dissolves any fat that you consumed. But in places such as under the chin, it can melt through the excess layer of fat like butter.
And best of all: it can do this without damaging anything else, since the chemical is engineered to exclusively target fat cells, leaving all others intact.
Side Effects, Recovery and Cost
Most modern cosmetic treatments are designed in such a way, to make recovery as easy for patients as possible. No one wants to spend days or weeks sitting inside after they got treated. They want to get back to their normal life as soon as possible and go through as little pain as possible.
Luckily, both treatments are very light on their side effects and recovery. Coolsculpting will only cause very light aching, which typically starts immediately after the treatment is finished. It’s completely normal to feel this, since your skin has just been through consistently cold temperatures for up to an hour and is just now getting used to the warmth. If you’re willing to bear through a little bit of aching, which goes away within the first day right after the treatment, you should be perfectly fine.
The one downside to Coolsculpting, however, is that you will have to wait a few months before your body gets fully toned. The fat cells need to take time and go through apoptosis, the process in which they destroy themselves and after this, the body will still need to rinse them out. But you don’t have to worry about going back and forth through clinics, since one session of Coolsculpting is enough.
Kybella is on the other side of the waiting spectrum. While it will take you several sessions and injections, the treatment does make a tangible difference in how the treated area looks much faster than Coolsculpting. Since the compound directly burns through the fat cells, you don’t have to wait for them to destroy themselves.
It’s a more direct approach to trimming fat, and while it is faster, it does come with more side effects than Coolsculpting. These are very minor and barely cause discomfort. Most patients say they feel burning and itchiness in the area, which is perfectly natural, as is swelling, redness and very light aching. But these go away within a couple days and never get to the kind of severity that they would distract you from your daily routines.
Cost is always a major factor to consider with any elective procedure because they are rarely covered by health insurance. Kybella cost in New York is variable and can cost between $500 and $900 per vial of medicine. The price for one CoolSculpting treatment in NYC is usually around $750 and depends on multiple factors such as number of treatments and expertise of the doctor performing the procedure.
And as you’re going through the recovery, you’ll need to keep in touch with the clinic specialists and report absolutely everything you feel to them, so that they know exactly what you’re going through. Cosmetic surgeons are always more than happy to help out and give some extra advice to patients, even after the procedures are finished. A great New York-based clinic that takes this to a whole new level is Skinly Aesthetics.
For their Coolsculpting and Kybella treatments, they keep in close contact with all their patients, to make sure that everything is going as planned. Trimming fat isn’t all that easy, even with cosmetic treatments, but if you work with a clinic that knows what it’s doing and does it well, you should have absolutely no problems sculpting your body to the shape and figure that you’ve always wanted.
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