Skin Tag and Mole Removal in Chicagoland

Skin tag and mole removal at Express Med Spa is done with the Dion plasma pen, a fine-tipped device that works without a scalpel and without stitches. The tip never actually touches your skin. It is held a fraction of a millimetre away, and the voltage across that tiny air gap ionizes the air into a small plasma arc.

That arc delivers a precise, shallow point of heat exactly where the provider aims it. The heat cauterizes the tissue of the lesion, which means the tiny blood vessels feeding it are sealed at the same moment the tissue itself is broken down. A skin tag lifts away during the visit. A raised mole is taken down in thin layers until it sits flush with the skin around it. Milia, which are small keratin cysts trapped under the surface, are opened and cauterized so the keratin can be released.

The reason a med spa can offer this at all is that the energy stays shallow. It is aimed at the raised lesion rather than driven down into the healthy dermis below, so there is no incision line to close and no suture to come out later. That is also the honest limit of the technique: it removes what sits at or above the skin surface. It is a cosmetic procedure performed by our nurse-practitioner-led team, and it does not include laboratory analysis of the tissue.

Skin tags. These are the small, soft, stalked growths that form where skin rubs against skin or against clothing. The usual spots are the neck, the underarms, the eyelids and the crease under the breasts, and they often arrive in clusters rather than one at a time. Because they sit on a narrow stalk, they are the quickest thing on this list to treat.

Raised cosmetic moles. We treat moles that are already known to be benign and that you simply want flattened or gone, most often on the face, neck, chest and back. A mole that is changing, new, irregular, itching or bleeding is a different situation entirely and belongs with a dermatologist first. That boundary is covered in full in the candidacy section further down this page.

Milia. These are the firm white bumps that sit just under the surface, most commonly around the eyes, on the cheeks and across the forehead. They are keratin trapped in a tiny closed pocket, which is exactly why they will not squeeze out and why they survive months of exfoliating. Milia removal is booked as its own visit because it takes longer and is usually a session of several bumps rather than one. It often comes up during a custom facial and skin analysis, where a provider can point out what is milia and what is closed acne.

One distinction is worth drawing clearly, because it decides which treatment you should be booking. The plasma pen addresses lesions with height: things you can feel with a fingertip. Flat pigment that you can see but not feel, such as sun spots, freckling and age spots, is a light-based job instead, handled with IPL photofacial. Our guide to sun spot removal covers that side of the line in more detail.

A skin tag or mole removal visit is booked as a 15 minute appointment, and a milia session is booked as 30 minutes. Most of that time is the parts either side of the treatment itself, because the plasma work on any single lesion takes seconds.

Assessment first. Your provider looks at each spot you want treated before anything is switched on. This is the step that decides whether we treat it, and it is also the step where we tell you if something should be looked at by a dermatologist or your physician before we go near it. You then complete a medical health history and a treatment consent form specific to skin tag and mole removal.

Numbing and preparation. The area is cleansed and a topical numbing cream is applied, then given time to take effect. Most people describe the treatment itself as a series of quick hot pinpricks or a light stinging snap, comfortable for the few seconds each lesion takes, rather than as something they need to brace for.

The treatment. The provider works spot by spot. As each lesion is treated you will see a small dark carbon crust form where it was, and you may notice a faint burning-hair smell, which is normal and comes from the tissue itself. Skin tags come away during the session. Raised moles are reduced in layers until they are level with the surrounding skin.

Afterwards. A healing ointment is applied and you are sent home with aftercare instructions, listed in full below. There is no dressing to manage in most cases and no stitches to have taken out, so people commonly come in on a lunch break and go back to the rest of their day. Current pricing for every tier sits on our med spa pricing page.

Where it is offered. Both SKUs run at all four Express Med Spa skin care clinics, so you can book wherever is closest: Frankfort, La Grange, Mount Greenwood, and Shorewood.

The same day. Where each lesion was, there is now a small dark crust sitting on slightly pink skin. Some mild swelling around the site for the first day or two is normal, particularly on thin skin such as the eyelids.

Days 1 to 3. The crust darkens and tightens. This is the stage that matters most for your final result, because the crust is the biological dressing protecting new skin underneath. Picking it off early is the single most common cause of a mark that lingers.

Days 7 to 14. The crust releases on its own and leaves fresh pink skin behind. Smaller sites on the face tend to be at the front of that range; larger sites, and anywhere on the body where skin turns over more slowly, sit at the back of it.

Weeks 4 to 12. The pink fades gradually toward your normal skin tone. Daily SPF 30 or higher over the treated area genuinely changes how this stage ends, because new skin that gets sun while it is still pink is what produces a darker patch afterward. That risk is higher, and the fading slower, on deeper skin tones. If a treated spot does settle darker than the skin around it, that is post-inflammatory pigment rather than the lesion coming back, and it responds to the same routine we recommend for fading dark spots.

How long it lasts. A skin tag or mole that has been fully removed does not grow back in that same spot. What the treatment cannot do is stop your skin from forming new ones. Skin tags in particular are driven by friction, weight change and hormones, so someone who grew a cluster on the neck once may well grow more there over the years and come back for a top-up session. Occasionally a deeper lesion is left with a small residual base on purpose, to keep the treatment shallow and protect the skin, and that one is finished at a follow-up visit once the area has healed.

Compared with IPL and laser. These are not competing options so much as tools for two different problems. Light-based treatment is absorbed by pigment, so it works on flat discoloration spread across an area. The plasma pen works on structure, so it handles a raised growth one spot at a time. If what bothers you is a patch of brown flatness, book IPL. If you can catch it with a fingernail, this is the treatment.

Compared with at-home removal kits. Over-the-counter freezing kits, removal bands, and the various acids and creams sold for this carry two problems. The practical one is control: they act on whatever they touch, including the healthy skin around the lesion, which is how home attempts leave marks that outlast the thing being removed. The serious one is that destroying a lesion at home also destroys the chance for anyone to look at it properly. A spot you assumed was a harmless mole is gone, and with it any opportunity to notice it was not.

Compared with surgical excision. A physician or dermatologist can cut a lesion out and send the tissue to a laboratory for analysis. That is a genuinely different service, and it is the right one whenever the question is what a lesion is rather than how to be rid of it. Our treatment is cosmetic: it removes lesions already understood to be harmless, and no tissue is sent for analysis. We refer out rather than treat when anything about a spot suggests it needs that answer first.

Why several are usually done together. Because pricing is banded by count rather than charged per spot, having the cluster on your neck dealt with in one visit costs considerably less per lesion than returning for them one at a time.