I had fractional co2 done a month ago and all my swellings are gone now I believe. I see may be 5-10% improvement? I'm not talking about individual scars, but in general. However, the residual redness makes the scar more prominent during the day time, so it kinda looks worse?

Also, even though I believe the collegan remodelling theories, I still think what you see after all your swelling goes down will be your final result. You might have some improvement over the 6 months, however, from my opinion, those are negligible

10 hours ago, myhojpoj said:

Ive read tens of acne scar treatment papers and maybe one or two follow up at regular intervals to show scar improvement and redness subsiding timelines... I had fully ablative co2 laser a couple months ago and just want to know how anyone else has healed. Basically how long has someone (could even be an outlier for all i care) taken for those two metrics. And what scale of improvementare we talking? Linear, logarithmic, etc? I think time period is fairly known to be 6 months. But i just want to know what comes in between procedure and the 6-month mark.

Depends on your scars. When I got my most aggressive CO2 treatment, I was bloody and scabby for about a week. I got hyperpigmentation for several months but it gradually went away. One crater scar got much shallower and I was very happy about it. It's somewhere between 40 and 60% improvement. We all have different scales so this could be 25 or 75% to you. The bottom line is that I didn't like one crater scar and, after one treatment, I don't need to improve it anymore. Other scars got shallower but I wanted a second treatment. Then there were some deeper scars that saw no change. These are scars that I got from accidents. The ones where I got stitches didn't improve at all.

The whole "scars continually improve during 6 months" doesn't carry much weight in my book. After CO2 treatment, your skin looks really good when it's swollen. Give it a few weeks and all of that excitement dips immensely. For me, I saw changes early on and it gradually died down instead of it getting better over time. That's how I feel.

I also got erythema during my other treatment. This was extremely persistent - I'm talking 4-6 months. It sometimes came and went maybe due to heat or me touching my face. But this was worse than hyperpigmentation for me.