Avoiding sun is essential and other options can help. What you can do to lessen them is to try a combination of Retin A, hydroquinone, and hydrocortisone to prevent further darkening of your skin and actually make the sun spots lighter.

During this application, you can use a number of different things to make the spots better such as intense pulse light, lasers, Active FX /CO2 resurfacing, and microdermabrasion. Some of these treatments can remove some superficial layers like microderm and superficial peels and help the topical medications go deeper to work on the cells and decrease the pigmentation.

More significant resurfacing will also help reduce the spots by removing them like co2, and deeper chemical peels. IPL can treat deeper pigments that even the co2 laser may not be able to reach. Sunscreen is essential that blocks uva and uvb light. And, physical blocks such as hats, and different screens during driving and at home can physically block sun from reaching your skin.

Age spots can be removed and reduced with lasers and intense pulse light. CO2 resurfacing can take most sun spots away that are at a certain depth. Deeper spots can be removed with different lasers such as ND YAG, Intense pulse light, alexandrite, ruby lasers.

CO2 resurfacing has some down time and you might need up to a week or more to recover. The other lasers have little downtime but may need multiple treatments and sometimes does not completely remove the spots. One thing to realize is that these spots can come back if you don’t take care of your skin. For less invasive approaches, sunblock that blocks uvA, and uvB, topicals like retin A, hydroquinone and hydrocortisone can help but are less effective and take a long time to see results.

Chemical peelscan also help in different degrees. The optimal treatment will different depending on what type of skin type you have, whether you are Caucasian, Asian, African american etc.

Age spots and melasma can be treated althought it is a difficult thing to treat. IPL’s, and all types of resurfacing can improve the appearance of these conditions. IPL treatment can affect deeper pigment. Sometimes the cooling will protect the more superficial pigment and hence this can stay within the  skin and also prevent penetration of other lasers.

Sometimes you need to combine very superficial peels or resurfacing to the mix to improve more superficial pigmentation. Very light co2 resurfacing can also be used to decrease the more superficial pigmentation. Also, light peels and even microdermabrasion can help your skin pigmentation by allowing the topicals you are using to penetrate deeper into the skin to affect the cells that are dispensing the pigment into the surrounding skin cells. I would also add a topical steroid to the mix of your other topicals. Stronger topicals can also be used as well to help the situation.