Sculptra is explored as a regenerative injectable treatment that gradually restores collagen, improves skin quality, and rebuilds facial volume over time. Unlike traditional fillers that deliver immediate results, Sculptra works with the body’s natural collagen production to create subtle, progressive improvements in skin resilience, structure, and glow.

Dr. Christelle Oliver-Dussault, Dr. Harpreet Lotay, and Amanda Manholt discuss who may benefit most from treatment, including patients experiencing age-related volume loss, rapid weight loss, or naturally lean facial features. Breaking down the importance of patient selection, lifestyle factors, treatment timelines, and realistic expectations, while also addressing common questions around downtime, maintenance, and long-term skin health. With a practical, educational approach, the conversation highlights how regenerative treatments can support natural-looking rejuvenation when paired with individualized care.

Key Takeaways

• Sculptra stimulates natural collagen production to improve volume, skin quality, and facial structure.
• Results develop gradually, making it ideal for subtle, natural-looking enhancement.
• Patient selection, lifestyle, and overall health influence treatment outcomes.
• Volume loss from aging, weight loss, or lean facial anatomy may respond well to regenerative approaches.
• Skin health habits and combination treatments can help support lasting results.

About the Hosts:

Dr. Harpreet Lotay is a family physician specializing in aesthetic medicine. She is the founder of Sona MD in Kamloops, BC, and serves as Chief Medical Officer at Bios Wellness Clinics. Known for her artistic approach and comprehensive non-surgical treatments, Dr. Lotay combines medical expertise with an eye for natural results. She is also an educator, a national trainer and holds academic appointments where she shares her knowledge in clinical dermatology and aesthetics. You can get in touch with her on Instagram @hlotaymd

Dr. Christelle Oliver-Dussault is a family physician specializing in aesthetic medicine, women’s health, and psycho-education. She brings a holistic, whole-person perspective to her clinical work, blending science with a deep understanding of the mind-body connection.

She is also the founder of Reclaim The Pink Within, a movement that empowers women to rediscover themselves during life’s most transformative stages. In addition, she is passionate about medical education and mentors the next generation of family physicians through her work with the department of Family Medicine at the University of British Columbia.

You can connect with her on Instagram @drchristellemd

Amanda Manholt is a clinic manager, patient consultant, and co-host of The Beauty Equation Podcast. With over 30 years of experience in beauty, aesthetics, and leadership, she has guided patients and teams alike toward confidence, growth, and empowerment. Known for her ability to connect with people and simplify the often-overwhelming world of aesthetics, Amanda brings a warm, practical, and relatable perspective to every conversation. You can find her on Instagram @crowsfeetandconfidence.

Websites

https://sonamd.ca/

https://www.getyourpinkbackproject.com/

Disclaimer: The Beauty Equation is for informational purposes only and not medical advice. This podcast does not create a doctor–patient relationship. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making medical or aesthetic decisions. Information may change as the field evolves.

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But then when we turn our attention to the skin aging itself,

can we actually target those things? Can we

target collagen production? And the answer is, yes, we can.

Right, so there are bioregenerative treatments that target that.

Can we target the thinning of the skin? Yes, we can.

Even with things like retinol. That's bioregenerative.

It's making your skin be thicker. It's making your skin

turn over better. Can we improve pigment production

to normalize it? Yes. We can use lasers

for photobiomodulation. We have lasers that will change

the way your genetic expression is within the skin.

Welcome to the Beauty Equation Podcast. I'm Amanda

Manholt, and I'm here with my co host, Dr. Oliver

Dusseau. Hello, everyone. And the lovely

Dr. Harpreet Lotte. Hello. Hello. And today

we're going to delve a little deeper into

bioregenerative injectables and talk about

Sculptra, which has been very

exciting, and we've seen a lot of great

results from this product. So without further ado,

let's talk about Sculptra and why we think it's pretty fantastic

for some people. Yes. Well, maybe we should start with saying what it is.

Polylactic acid. Am I saying it right? Yeah. L poly. L poly.

Something or other. Polylactic acid. Yeah. It's

valuable. The acronyms are always

easy to remember, so much easier. And if you want to know what it looks

like when we. When we get it, it comes in these lovely little vials with

a little sort of a powder in here. And it is reconstituted into

a liquid. Yeah. And it is

essentially absorbable sutures

broken down into a powder form. So many of you

who've had cuts before, we will use absorbable

sutures, and they break down naturally in your body, but they also act as

a scaffold. And that's the principle behind it of

acting like a scaffold. But there's different

applications and caveats for the use of

Sculptra. I might let you, Harpreet, talk about how you

select a patient for Sculptra. Sure. Because

the benefits of a treatment are often in the right treatment for

the right patients. Yeah. And I think that holds for most treatments. You know, patient

selection is everything. So not everything is

perfect for you, even if it was perfect for your friend. Right.

So definitely I can talk about that and also just touch on the history

of Sculptra, because it's not something that's new. New. It's been around

for. I want to say like 30 years,

maybe a long time. And it actually came

to the market in response to the thinness

and basically weight loss that we

saw in patients with HIV aids. So

patients with that would get very, very skinny and they would

get so thin in the face they would look quite sick. And

this injectable would really helped restore some

of their, the volume in their face and just

made their life that much easier. And then it went on to

be used in aesthetic patients and I would say it sort of fell

out of favor a little bit because hyaluronic acid based fillers

were in the market and gave you immediate results. And

Sculptra doesn't work that way. So when we look at patients

who sculptor is good for, it's good for people who are patient.

Oh, it's for the patient. Patient.

So it's great for people who want

to do something to improve their collagen and give them a

bit of plumpness and volume over time,

wherein they don't want people to know what they've done,

they may not want their partner to know what they've done.

And it will give them gradual, slow improvement over a

six to nine to 18 month period. So it's

long. It is not a one time treatment. So

it's good for people who are going to see us on a more

continual basis, at least come to see us three times.

It is also, I find, good for people who are very

slim. Yeah, I love it in runners. Yes,

it's such a nice treatment in runners because they're so fit and

oftentimes I find like they eventually will have a disconnect between their

body and their face because they lose so much volume in their face and it

just ends up rebalancing them. So naturally. Yeah.

And. And the other patient category is people with

rapid weight loss, people who are on GLP1s.

Interesting data with GLP1s. Now we're seeing that people

will lose weight, but it seems like

their face loses volume maybe a little bit

disproportionately and the data's out on that. But we do

see a lot of volume loss in people's face bases when they go on

GLP1s. So that's another patient

population that Sculper is great for.

A contraindication for sure. So I think if

you have a history of any autoimmune disease, because

it is working through an inflammatory pathway

and when there's any form of autoimmune disease, we don't know how your

immune system will react to that inflammation. We don't have control of

it. So it's safer to use

another treatment option, if that is your concern. Safe to say

we don't know if your immune system

would know to shut off. Right. Yeah. So will it overreact? Will it

underreact? Yeah, we just don't know. It's hard to predict. And I think that's something

that's worth mentioning too, with any of the bioregenerative

treatments. We're all human beings and

little our own little organisms. So, you know, to your

point about it was good for my friend, it doesn't necessarily mean it's good for

me. Like, results will vary on from one person to the next.

Right. Based on how healthy they are, their diet, their

lifestyle, you know, are they baking in the sun and smoking a pack

a day? I mean, you're gonna see different. Yeah. What you fuel your

body with, particularly when you're using these treatments that

harness your own physiology, your own cellular

mechanisms that fuel will have a huge impact on the result.

Yeah. Getting enough sleep, all of those things. Right. Protein intake.

So going back to our GLP1 patients, if they're not able

to eat enough, they may not get the

full result. And if the GLP

is very, very anti inflammatory for them,

you know, maybe another treatment is something we need to think about. So there's, there's

a few things to consider for sure. Yeah. But to your point about,

you know, slimmer patients, it really is lovely because I

think oftentimes those, those patients that are quite slim

worry that they're going to look, you know, puffy or weird with

a traditional filler. And while that may or

may not be the case, I think psychologically that this feels

better to a lot of them because they, they don't feel like they're gonna look

like a chipmunk or unlike themselves. Yeah. It has a

beautiful impact. Beautiful impact on the quality of the skin too.

Absolutely. You can kind of spot them when they walk into the door. There's just

a bit more reflection to the skin that

glow that you just can't put your finger on. Yeah. And that's what a lot

of people tell us too. And they come back for sure. And I feel like,

you know, when you've done a treatment and then they're back for their second one

in four weeks, it's pretty cool because even

at that point I feel like you're starting to see that

it's the collagen. So collagen is white.

So as we get more collagen within our skin, you see more

Reflection. Right. The light will bounce off that white structure in the

skin. It's kind of cool. Yeah. As you've said before, it's. Why when you look

at little children, they have that luminosity to

them. Like, where are you going? The sandbox with those perfect

lips and long eyelashes. Little boy.

It's always the boys that get the eyelashes. I know. It's so not fair.

Yeah. So Sculptor again is a really great treatment for anybody that's looking

for a global improvement to the skin

collagen. Sort of a general tightening

is, I think it's fair to say, as the skin becomes more robust. Yeah, yeah.

You would come and see us once a week. Sorry, Once a month.

Pardon me? Once a month or. That'd be a bit much.

Sorry for you to come see us once once a month or come to see

us to say hello. Yeah, yeah. Between four to six weeks. Can

you talk a little bit about off label,

on label, like places that it's used? Because I know that there are some clinics,

we don't really do it here, but they're using large volumes of it for

people's bottoms. Yeah. You can do it for an

injectable bbl. You can use it on the body

for laxity in the abdomen, you can. Some people will

use it in necks. The dilutions are a bit different, but it can be used

in many, many different places. It just

touching on post care, it does need to be massaged.

So wherever we put it, you need to be able to massage it well five

times a day for five minutes for five days.

See, I can remember that. Yeah. Easy one.

So. And it's very common too, to. Because there's a lot of fluid

going in to find that you might even look

puffy leaving, or you're happy with the level of puffiness. And then you wake up

the next day and you're like, where did it all go? Yeah, that's

normal. And the other thing to expect, sometimes bruising. So

whenever you're injecting, you have basically expect bruising, but overall, not really much

downtime. And. And it's not a procedure that take. That

takes that long either. No, yeah, no. Yeah, it's. It's

a. I feel like all of our patients have tolerated

it quite well and haven't been dreading their subsequent

treatments. You know, they're more excited to come for their second and

third round. Yeah, yeah. And then in terms of, you know,

the length of time that those results are lasting, are we.

You know, I think the studies were saying two years.

Yeah. 18 months. Generally, people will come back in

need or want. Need is a strong word, will

want another treatment. And people

often will ask, well, how long does this last? Well, it's, it's,

you're making collagen. It will last as long as your native

collagen would last. So it really is dependent on how fast

your sort of eating up that collagen. So again, lifestyle

factors and genetics come into play yet again. So,

but generally speaking, 18 months. So most people don't need

the first sort of three loading dose kind of treatments

when they come in at the 18 months. It's one session.

Yeah. Great. I can't think of anything else

to ask or talk about in terms of skulkra other than

come on in. Well, we can talk about what they might hear on

social media, especially the plastic surgeons have been, some

of them right. Saying, don't

get Sculptra, you'll never be able to have a facelift. And for some

people that's just fine. But

there's controversies around that. So the way that Sculptra works, as we said,

is to create collagen within your tissues. And some

plastic surgeons do feel that the, that collagen that's

created will actually adhere or join

tissue layers together. And some of them feel like it

might make facelifts harder. And having said

that, we also have plastic surgeons who use Sculptra

and feel like it's no problem. They just adjust their

surgery schedule and don't do surgery on people who've had

it within 18 months. So generally speaking, if you come to

us and you say, I don't have a problem with a facelift, in fact, I'm

thinking of having one in the next year. We might steer you away from

Sculptra. However, many surgeons

also say, you know what, I do

surgery in people who've had car accidents or other

scarring events all the time. And it's really a testament to

my surgical skill, which I would, they would

argue every surgeon would have to be able to deal with all kinds of

patients, patients who have very smooth, slippery tissue and

patients where there needs to be a little bit more work and caretaker

vacant to do the surgery. So that's the

controversy around that. Yeah. I

find that to me, it makes sense to have a

treatment that's going to address the quality of the tissue because a

facelift is just pulling that canvas. Yeah. And you're

not addressing what is actually happening in terms of aging.

And in combination, it's a good

option because at some stage you may need Some degree of

pulling. But you're better to pull

healthier skin or skin that has thickened than very thin,

friable skin. Yeah. So, yeah, I think good

skin looks good on anybody, no matter what. You

know, it's always a good investment, whether you're going to have surgery

or not. Making care of your skin and using your. All

your tools, lasers, microneedling, skincare,

all that. Yep. Sunscreen. Let's not forget the sunscreen.

Everybody rolls their eyes. I think it's like the best thing. Like it's the best

thing you can do. A hundred percent. It is. Yeah. It's just not

sexy. Nope. Or like marketing fun. It'll keep you

sexy. Keep using it. That's what I say. That's right.

That in my estrogen patch. Yeah. Right. A lot of

people don't know UV damage also accelerates the

volume loss in your. So. So it's just

good all round, not just even for the topical skin.

Yeah, absolutely. So Sculptra, anybody

that is feeling like their skin is getting a little thin or weak or

non reflective, devitalized. I'm trying to think of other words.

Noticing accordion lines, like when you smile. It

works great on those types of patients. Yeah. Because you can't Botox them or they'll

look like they had a stroke

and it. Or it won't work. Yeah. More importantly. And you're not going to add

a bunch of volume in the lower face. What you want is, is, you

know, nice, stretchy, bouncy, resilient skin.

Exactly. Yeah. A lot of people are. Women are bothered by that. So

those accordion lines is a name for them. But if you think about,

if someone smiles big and if you look at a picture of you from the

side, you've got, you know, your smile, but then in behind, you've got like the

waves kind of in behind. Right. Yeah,

it works really well for that. And again, that's. You often see that on those

slimmer women. Yeah. Right. So

great for that. Typically done in a series of three treatments

a month apart. And downtime is not. No, not

significant. Not really significant. No, not much at all. Popular for a reason.

And the thing I love about it too is, like you said, it's been around

for a very, very long time. It has.

I think I would assume that that's one thing as

physicians that gives you some comfort when you're doing things. Because

let's face it, these are elective procedures. We're not saving anybody's life.

So it must make you feel better to know that it's tried and

tested. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So we're going to be talking about

another product that's been around for a long time on our

next episode, and that is Radiesse or calcium

Hydroxyapatite. And there's a newer calcium

Hydroxyapat product on the market now in

North America. It's been in South America for a while. And

tune in to hear all about that new option available to

you on our next episode. So if you enjoyed

today's episode, make sure you please like and

subscribe. Yeah. So you don't miss an episode. Thanks so much

for hanging out with us. Bye for now. Bye for now.