A chemical peel will fade hyperpigmentation. It will not remove it, and anyone promising you that is selling you something. At my Southsea clinic a Jessner peel on the face is £70 and a BIEN TCA peel on the face is £80, and pigmentation almost always needs a course rather than a single visit.
I am Natasha, the only practitioner at House of Glam HQ, and I choose and apply every peel here myself. This is the version I give people in the chair: which peel suits which kind of pigmentation, what it costs, how many you are likely to need, and the point at which I would tell you a peel is the wrong thing to spend your money on.
Will a chemical peel remove hyperpigmentation?
No. It fades it, which is a different promise and a more honest one.
A peel lifts the pigmented cells sitting in the upper layers of the skin and pushes what is underneath to turn over faster. What it does not do is switch off the cells that make the pigment in the first place. Those are still there, still responding to sunlight, to hormones and to anything that inflames the skin, and they will start again if you give them a reason.
So the realistic outcome is lighter, more even skin that you then have to protect. Marks left behind by old spots often go a long way towards clearing. Sun damage lightens and softens. Melasma improves and then behaves itself only for as long as you stay off the sun. None of that is a disappointment if you know it going in, which is why I would rather write it down than have you find out on peel number three.
Which kind of pigmentation have you actually got?
This matters more than which acid you have read about, because the three common kinds behave very differently.
Post-inflammatory pigmentation. The brown or grey marks left where a spot, an ingrown hair or a scratch used to be. This is the kind that responds best. The pigment is mostly shallow, it is not being actively re-made once the spot has gone, and a course of peels clears a good deal of it.
Sun damage and age spots. Flat brown patches on the face, the chest and the backs of the hands, built up over years rather than weeks. Peels lighten these steadily, and they come back if you go back to sunbathing without cover.
Melasma. Larger, softer-edged patches, often across the cheeks, forehead or upper lip, usually hormonal and often triggered by pregnancy or the pill. This is the difficult one. Melasma is a condition you manage rather than clear, it sits deeper than people expect, and an aggressive peel can make it worse rather than better.
I cannot tell those apart reliably from a photograph on my phone, and neither can you from an article. If you want it looked at before you commit to an area and a price, the consultation is £15 on Fresha and comes off the treatment when you go ahead.
Which is the best peel for hyperpigmentation?
I keep two peels on the menu, and for pigmentation the answer is usually the BIEN TCA. It is a 35% bi-phasic trichloroacetic acid, gentler than most TCA peels but the deeper of the two here, and it is the one built for pigment, scarring, texture and early fine lines.
The Jessner is salicylic acid, lactic acid and resorcinol in one solution. It is lighter, and I reach for it when the skin is still breaking out, because clearing the congestion is what stops new marks appearing behind the ones you are trying to fade. Treating the marks while the spots keep coming is a losing arrangement.
There is no good-better ladder here. On a very reactive skin, or a deeper Fitzpatrick type, the lighter peel is often the correct choice for pigmentation and the deeper one is the risky one.
| What you have | The peel I would usually choose | Face price |
|---|---|---|
| Marks left by old spots | Jessner, while the skin is still congested | £70 |
| Marks left by spots, skin now clear | BIEN TCA | £80 |
| Sun damage and age spots | BIEN TCA | £80 |
| Melasma | Assessed first, then started light | £70 or £80 |
What a peel for pigmentation costs
Pigmentation turns up in the same few places, so these are the areas people book for it. Every price here is the price, with no tier you have to be told you are in afterwards.
| Peel and area | Price |
|---|---|
| Jessner, face | £70 |
| Jessner, neck | £50 |
| Jessner, chest and décolletage | £70 |
| BIEN TCA, face | £80 |
| BIEN TCA, neck | £60 |
| BIEN TCA, chest and décolletage | £80 |
| BIEN TCA, backs of both hands | £80 |
| BIEN TCA, tummy | £130 |
| BIEN TCA, half back | £130 |
| BIEN TCA, full back, about an hour | £200 |
| Consultation first, if you would rather talk before booking a treatment. Deducted from the treatment | £15 |
Every one of those books straight to that exact treatment on my chemical peels page rather than dropping you on a general menu. Courses of three and six are available on all of them, and I do not publish a course figure because it depends on the peel and the area, so message me on WhatsApp and I will send you the number for yours before you book anything. Klarna spreads any treatment over three monthly payments.
Every price is published, where most Portsmouth clinics quote only after a consultation. If you want the full breakdown of what moves a peel price, I have written that out in my guide to what a chemical peel costs.
How many peels will it take?
One peel brightens. It is a real effect and you will see it, but on pigmentation it is not the result you came for.
Fading takes a course, three or six peels, four to six weeks apart. The gap is not padding. Your skin needs to finish its own turnover cycle before the next one goes on, and peeling it again too soon is how you inflame skin that is already prone to making pigment.
Which number you need is not something I will guess before I have seen how your skin handled the first one. Shallow post-acne marking often looks noticeably better by the third. Sun damage that took twenty years to arrive takes the six and then maintenance. Melasma is ongoing.
Pigmentation on darker skin, and the risk nobody mentions
Peels are done on Fitzpatrick IV to VI skin and I do them. What I will not do is put a deep peel on a skin type that is prone to post-inflammatory pigmentation and hope for the best.
The risk is straightforward: the trauma of a strong peel can itself trigger the skin to lay down more pigment, so the treatment you booked to fade a mark leaves you with a darker one. That risk is genuinely higher on deeper skin tones, and it goes up with the strength of the peel and the number of layers.
So I assess your skin type before I choose an acid, I start lighter than you might expect, and if I think the safe version is not going to give you what you want, I will tell you that instead of taking the booking. That assessment happens at the start of your appointment at no separate charge, and the peel is chosen there rather than picked off a dropdown when you book.
What are the downsides of a chemical peel?
The flaking is the obvious one, and it is a social cost rather than a medical one. Makeup does not hide shedding skin, so there is a week in the middle where you will not want photographs.
The one that actually matters is the pigment risk above. After that it is the discipline: daily sun protection, no sunbeds, and no strong actives until the skin has settled. If that sounds like more admin than you want, a peel will underperform for you, and it is fair that you know that before you pay. I have written the unglamorous version of the recovery in my guide to chemical peel downtime.
What is the worst day after a chemical peel?
There is no single day I would promise you, because it depends which peel you had and how your skin behaves. The shape of it is consistent enough to plan around, though.
Day one is tight and a little pink. The flaking follows, and that is the part people mind rather than the treatment itself. Three to five days of it after a Jessner, five to seven after a TCA. Do not pick it, because pulling skin off early is how people end up with a mark that outlasts the one they came in to fix.
The practical version: book two to three weeks before any day that matters.
Who cannot get a chemical peel?
Anyone pregnant or breastfeeding, which catches a lot of people with melasma and is worth knowing early. Anyone with an active cold sore or broken skin in the area. Anyone who has been on isotretinoin recently. Anyone with a fresh tan or sunburn, and that includes fake tan sitting on the skin.
Peels here are for adults, eighteen and over. If you have a raised, scaly or changing patch rather than a flat brown one, that belongs with your GP first, because the diagnosis matters more than the treatment.
What is a good age to get a chemical peel?
There is no age at which pigmentation starts being worth treating. What decides it is what your skin is doing, not the number.
In practice I see post-acne marking mostly in people in their twenties, melasma in the thirties and forties, and sun damage on the face, chest and hands from the forties onwards. All three are treatable at any of those ages. The only hard line is that peels here are for over-eighteens.
Sun protection is what decides whether any of it holds
This is the least interesting paragraph on the page and the most important one. Pigment cells are triggered by ultraviolet light, including on a grey day in February, and a peel leaves the new surface more reactive than usual for a few weeks.
Daily high-factor sun protection is not an upsell. It is the difference between a course of peels you are still pleased with next summer and a course of peels you paid for twice. If you are not going to wear it, I would rather you kept the £80.
When a peel is not the answer
A peel works on the top of the skin. If what bothers you is depth rather than colour, deep or ice-pick scarring for instance, microneedling from £80 works below the surface and is usually the better spend. Where pigment and shallow scarring sit together, I often do both, spaced out rather than stacked.
I do not offer a pigment laser or IPL at this clinic. The laser here is for hair removal only, so if you have been reading about laser pigment treatment, that is a conversation for somewhere that has the device, and I will say so rather than talk you into a peel.
If you want the wider view of what evens skin tone beyond peels, I have written about that in my guide to skin brightening treatment in Portsmouth, and the peel side of acne marking in more detail in chemical peels for acne scarring.
Book a chemical peel for pigmentation in Portsmouth
House of Glam HQ is at 1A Auckland Road East, Southsea, Portsmouth, PO5 2HA, with free street parking nearby. Clients come for peels from Southsea, Fratton, Cosham, Havant, Fareham, Gosport and Waterlooville.
Pick the peel and the area from the chemical peels page and it books that exact treatment on Fresha with live availability. If you would rather show me the pigmentation first, message me on WhatsApp with a photo in daylight and no makeup, or call 07831 846273, and you will get a straight answer on which peel, which area, and whether a course is worth it for what you have.
