‍That last row is worth pausing on. The UV image is the one that stops people. It shows sun damage that hasn’t surfaced yet, sitting under skin that looks fine, and nobody forgets seeing it.

What the scan actually sees

I use the Image Pro Skin Imaging SUNLITE, which captures your face with multiple high-definition lenses under four different lighting conditions. Each one reveals something the others can’t.

Normal light. The baseline. What you and everyone else sees.

Parallel polarized light. Surface detail at magnification: texture, pore size and distribution, fine lines, and the actual condition of your skin’s surface.

Cross polarized light. This cancels surface reflection and looks underneath, which is where vascular patterns, inflammation, and subsurface pigment live. This is how I distinguish redness that’s vascular from redness that’s inflammatory, and they need completely different treatment.

UV light. The one that changes people’s minds. Ultraviolet imaging reveals accumulated sun damage that hasn’t yet appeared on the surface, and it’s almost always more extensive than what’s visible. What you’re seeing is what’s coming.

From those images, I get objective measurement across nine things that actually matter:

• Pores

• Elasticity

• Wrinkles

• Sebum

• Skin tone

• Hydration

• UV damage

• Porphyrins, which show bacterial activity inside your pores. This is the one nobody expects, and it’s why the scan is so useful for anyone dealing with breakouts

• Skin age index

There’s also AI analysis layered on top, which processes the imaging and generates recommendations. It’s useful, and it’s a starting point rather than the answer. Which brings me to the part that actually matters. ‍

Blood work for your face, and why interpretation is the whole thing

Here’s the analogy I use, because it’s exact.

If you had blood work back showing high cholesterol, you wouldn’t frame it and put it on the wall. You’d change something. Diet, exercise, a medication, and then you’d retest to see whether what you changed worked.

That’s what this is. Objective data about an organ, used to make a decision, then re-measured. The scan is the lab result. The interpretation is the medicine.

And this is where I differ from most places running this equipment. An imaging system can tell you that you have elevated inflammation and pigment. It cannot tell you that your inflammation pattern is consistent with what I see in women with gut dysbiosis, or that your pigment is following a hormonal distribution rather than a UV one, or that your poor texture and slow healing look like the nutrient deficiency I’d want to confirm with a blood panel.

I’ve spent fifteen years treating what’s happening inside people. So when I look at your skin data, I’m not only seeing a list of scores. I’m seeing which of those scores have an internal driver, which ones are purely external, and what that means for the order we do things in.

That’s why you also leave with nutritional and supplement recommendations. Not as an upsell, as a mechanism. Collagen synthesis requires specific amino acids, vitamin C, zinc, and adequate protein. If your levels are short, I can stimulate your skin all day and it won’t have the materials to build with. The scan frequently shows me that story before a blood test confirms it.

How I use it to prove treatment is working, and to change course when it isn’t

This is the part most clinics won’t tell you, so I will.

In a lot of practices, the scan happens once, at the beginning, as a sales tool. You get imaged, you get shown your worst features, and a package gets recommended. The scanner has done its job, which was to sell you something.

I rescan. During treatment, and after.

So we can see, in numbers rather than impressions, whether your pore metrics improved, whether pigment reduced, whether your texture scores moved, whether elasticity changed, and whether your skin age index shifted. Side by side, same lighting, same angles, same measurements.

And here’s the commitment that comes with that: if the data says it isn’t working, I change the protocol.

Not sell you more of the same. Change it. Different treatment, different sequence, different boosters, or a hard look at whether something internal is holding your skin back. A treatment plan that isn’t producing measurable change is information, and the right response to that information is to do something different.

I don’t know many places willing to build that into how they work, because it means admitting when a plan needs revision. I’d rather do that than keep selling you sessions.

Your products, decided by data instead of recommendations

Let me say something about the products, because this is where most women are wasting the most money.

The skincare aisle, online or at Sephora, is not built around your skin. It’s built around volume. Your friend’s holy grail serum worked for your friend’s skin. The influencer is being paid. The algorithm knows what you clicked, not what your barrier function is doing.

All of that is a recommendation. None of it is an assessment.

After a scan, the conversation changes completely. If your barrier is compromised, you need to stop exfoliating, and no amount of active ingredients will help until that’s repaired. If your pigment is subsurface and hormonal, a brightening product aimed at surface pigment will disappoint you. If your hydration measures are low, that changes which order your existing products should go on in.

Most women end up buying less, not more. A shorter routine, targeted at what their skin is actually asking for, and permission to stop using three things that were working against them.

What to expect

Arrive without makeup if you can, or come a few minutes early and we’ll cleanse. Remove jewelry from the neck up.

The capture takes a few minutes. You rest your chin and forehead in position and the system captures the images. Nothing touches your skin. There’s no discomfort and nothing to recover from.

Then we sit down and go through it together, which is the part that matters. Not a printout emailed to you afterward. I walk you through what each image shows, what’s meaningful, what’s noise, and what I’d do about it in what order.

You leave with a plan. Treatment sequence, product recommendations, and where relevant, nutritional and supplement recommendations plus any lab work I’d want to see.

We rescan as we go, so progress is measured rather than assumed.

For clients working through a longer treatment plan, this is also how results are documented objectively, and it’s the measurement my Potentia Skin Progress Promise is based on.

What it costs

I’m going to be straightforward about this, because most practices won’t put a number on a webpage

A standalone skin analysis is $100, and that includes me sitting down and interpreting it with you. Not a printout, not an emailed PDF. The scan takes a few minutes and the conversation is the part worth showing up for.

It’s included in your initial strategy session if you’re coming in for a consultation.

And if you go on to purchase a treatment plan, it’s typically included at no charge, because at that point it’s how I build your plan and how I prove the plan is working.

I keep it at that price deliberately. This is the front door to everything else I do, and I’d rather you have your own data than have you guessing about products for another year.

What a skin analysis doesn’t do

I’d rather set this straight than have you assume.

It isn’t a skin cancer screening. The UV imaging shows accumulated sun damage, which is a pattern of photodamage, not a lesion assessment. It doesn’t detect or rule out skin cancer. If you have a spot that’s new, changing, growing, bleeding, or not healing, that needs proper evaluation on its own terms, and sometimes a biopsy with a dermatologist. Bring it to me and I’ll look, and I’ll tell you honestly what it needs.

It isn’t a diagnosis. It’s objective data about your skin’s condition. The diagnosis, if there is one, comes from clinical assessment, your history, and where needed, lab work.

The skin age index is a tracking number, not a verdict. It compares your skin’s measurements against a reference population, and it’s genuinely useful, because a number moving in the right direction is real evidence that treatment is working. It is not a judgment about you, and I don’t use it that way. If seeing it wouldn’t be helpful for you, we don’t have to look at it.

It doesn’t replace the conversation. The imaging tells me what’s there. You tell me what you care about. Those are different pieces of information and I need both.

Skin analysis near me: why women in the East Bay come here

• I rescan to prove it’s working, and I change the protocol when the data says a plan isn’t producing results.

• I read it with knowledge of what’s happening inside you, so an inflammation pattern or a pigment distribution means something more to me than a score.

• You leave with nutritional and supplement recommendations, because skin without raw materials cannot rebuild no matter what I do to it.

• It isn’t a sales tool here. It’s the diagnostic that determines your plan, and sometimes it tells me to do less rather than more.

• You’ll probably buy fewer products, and the ones you keep will be the ones doing something.

• Objective documentation, which is what my written results guarantee on longer plans is measured against.

• An award winning doctor with fifteen years of practice in the East Bay. I’ve been voted Best Doctor of the East Bay, and I have page after page of five star reviews that show how hard I work for my patients.

I’m in Lafayette, CA, easy to reach from Walnut Creek, Orinda, Moraga, Danville, Alamo, Pleasant Hill, Berkeley, Oakland, and the broader East Bay.