Scientists have come up with a new use for sunless tanning spray or the compound in body bronzer-surgeons say tanners or bronzers can be used to fill the holes from plastic surgery, reconstructions, or other medical surgeries.
Sugar-based molecules of sunless tanning spray are designed to help people look "better" and a bit more "brown"-but now sunless tanning sprays might be used to make surgery patients undergoing cancer surgeries or reconstruction look even better. Molecules in sunless tanning sprays or bronzers stick to skin, and can be combined with a chemical in order to create a sticky gel bandage that supposedly will help medical wounds and surgeries heal better.
Plastic surgeons at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York have come up with what doctors are describing as an “internal Band-Aid”: so "tanners" are helping seal and fill the gaps and holes that surgery leaves behind.
Surgery procedures to remove cancerous tissue, or surgeries to reconstruct body parts, typically cause hollow spaces that fill with fluid in the skin-called "seromas". Seromas need to be drained, manually or through implanted shunts. That seroma draining is potentially painful, and a possible cause for infection. Using the new gel created from sunless tanning sprays, doctors and plastic surgeons could fill the hole and let it heal, says Dr. Spector, a plastic surgeon and co-author of a new study about the product. Results are being published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The new substance [made from sunless tanning sprays] would act to glue together the [surgery] hole left behind to prevent seroma build-up,” says Dr. Spector. The new gel, made up of polyethylene glycol and a polycarbonate of dihydroxyacetone, is durable enough to stick to skin tissue while also being biodegradable and water soluble. In other words, that tanning mix won't stick around forever-but does stick to skin long enough to allow healing after surgeries.
In rats it's been shown to reduce the chance of seromas and fluid build-up but doctors are gearing up for human trials of the tanning spray with mixed "gel".