What Lasers Can Do, according to a Dermatologist and Skin Cancer Surgeon | Goop

The Beauty Closet Questionnaire

goop beauty editors Jean Godfrey-June and Megan O’Neill love to ask—and answer—questions. On their
podcast, The Beauty Closet, they’re doing both. To
familiarize you with each week’s guest, we came up with a goop beauty (and
life) questionnaire.

THIS WEEK WE’RE TALKING TO:

Michelle Henry, MD, dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon

What are the best techniques for smoothing crow’s-feet? Is it true that “Black don’t crack”? What
really can be done with lasers? How do you freshen someone up without making them look “done”? How do we treat
adult acne at home? What does it mean to specialize in skin of color? And how do we get a complexion as
impossibly poreless as Dr. Michelle Henry’s? (Yes, that’s her above, not a model.) On the latest episode of The
Beauty Closet, NYC-based Henry, a Mount Sinai– and Harvard-trained dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon, has
brilliant, super useful answers to questions on everything from how to feel and look our best as we age to
whether there’s an ideal facial structure. She’s got the kind of reassuring humor you’d expect from a lifelong
girlfriend and a perspective on what it means to feel beautiful and confident in a wider sense—beyond in-office
treatments and supercreams, race, age, and even her own aesthetic techniques. It’s just an incredible episode.

LISTEN NOW

Her talents lie not only in her command of the many different lasers, injectables, and surgical
techniques but also in her ability to tailor them to individual patients. “As aesthetic surgeons, we learn so-called
golden ratios—for instance, the ratio in size between the upper and lower lip—that make no sense if, in the case
of lips, you’re Black or East Asian,” says Henry, who serves on numerous diversity and inclusion boards for
major aesthetic companies. “So if you’re applying these golden ratios to a Black patient, you’re not serving them.”

Henry’s episode is an absolutely fascinating one, and so are her answers to the goop beauty
questionnaire.