Original Article by Lexi Novak. Sculpting facials, detoxing cleanses, bootcamp workouts—prep for award season follows a mostly standard and unsurprising formula. That is, until Danny Holbus, founder of DMH Aesthetics in Los Angeles, started revealing the other ways in which stars are getting ready for the red carpet circuit.
“We have two CoolSculpting machines, and they never stop,” says Holbus, who sees actresses as young as their 20s coming in to freeze away fat. “We have one A-lister who’s about 28, and she works her ass off, but I want her to come out about CoolSculpting. I did it when I was 24—I went to Barry’s Bootcamp every day for five years and always had love handles. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do, and that’s what it’s for.”
Of the seven-days-a-week CoolSculpting appointments DMH Aesthetics has though, the surge of pre-awards procedures hasn’t been on the midsection, thighs, butt, or chin. “I can foresee trends coming, but I never thought women were going to want their upper bra area [treated],” says Holbus. “It’s crazy how many people we’ve been doing it on.” But zapping the underarm puff often caused by strapless dresses wasn’t something DMH originally pushed. Holbus said clients were the ones coming in requesting the area once the CoolSculpting Mini device was available—that and the region above the knees. (The CoolSculpting Mini is a smaller applicator that was just approved last year for smaller pockets of fat, like under the chin. And the armpits.)
CoolSculpting, a process by which cold metal panels applied to the surface of the skin to freeze away fat cells, was initially approved by the FDA in 2010 for reducing fat in the abdomen and in 2014 for thighs.