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Wellness in Stratham, NH

A Personalized Approach to Wellness

If you’re looking for a smarter, more personalized approach to feeling your best, you’re in the right place. We offer a range of wellness services designed to restore balance, boost energy, and support long-term health, without a one-size-fits-all approach.

Feeling off, tired, or struggling to lose stubborn weight? Want to unlock collagen-building treatments to support healthy skin, hair, and nails, or learn more about natural anti-aging supplements? Struggling with perimenopause or symptoms of menopause, or other hormonal imbalances?

From hormone optimization and peptide therapy to medically guided weight loss, our safe and personalized wellness treatments are tailored to help you look better, feel better, and live better at every stage of life

Conversations with Dr. Whitney on Skin and Hormones

Dr. Whitney Elsesser, DNP, CNM

Certified Nurse Midwife & Wellness Provider

At About Face, clients don’t have to choose between aesthetic treatments and whole-body wellness — the two work together. Alongside the clinic’s roster of aesthetic providers, wellness provider Dr. Whitney Elsesser helps clients take a deeper look at what’s driving how they look and feel, from hormone levels to inflammation to body composition. We sat down with her to talk about something that doesn’t come up enough in the treatment room: the ways your internal health shows up on your face.

There's a lot of conversation right now about collagen — supplements, topicals, treatments. But you'd argue the conversation should start somewhere else entirely. Where?

With estrogen. Most people don’t realize that estrogen is responsible for helping your body make and maintain collagen levels. So, when estrogen starts to decline naturally through perimenopause and menopause, you’re not just dealing with hot flashes or mood changes. You’re dealing with a drop in one of the key drivers of skin elasticity, firmness, and texture.

That’s why skin can start to feel thinner, drier, and less resilient as women age — it’s not just time passing, it’s a hormonal shift happening underneath the surface. When we optimize estrogen through bioidentical hormone therapy, we’re giving the body what it needs to keep producing collagen the way it’s supposed to. Women often come in focused on one symptom and then notice their skin looks different too. That’s not a coincidence.

Tell us about GLOW and KLOW. These are peptide blends you're recommending to patients — what do they actually do, and how do you know which one someone needs?

Both are peptide blends that support hair, skin, and nails, and both have meaningful anti-inflammatory benefits. GLOW contains BPC-157 and TB-500, which are well-regarded for tissue repair and reducing inflammation throughout the body. KLOW builds on that foundation with the addition of KPV, a powerful anti-inflammatory peptide that makes it particularly well-suited for patients dealing with higher levels of systemic inflammation.

I recommend KLOW a lot for patients whose ShapeScale scans are showing inflammation markers. I’m also on it myself, alongside Daxxify. Ericka — our owner and one of our providers here at About Face — stopped me one day and said, “what are we doing with your face? Your skin is like glass.” I’ll take it.

You talk a lot about inflammation. For someone who thinks of inflammation as something that happens after an injury, can you explain what chronic inflammation actually looks like — and how it shows up in the skin?

Chronic inflammation is quieter than an injury, but it does real damage over time. Dullness, uneven tone, puffiness, slower healing — a lot of what people chalk up to aging or stress has an inflammatory component driving it.

The ShapeScale body scan gives us a detailed picture of where inflammation is showing up in the body. When someone sees those red and orange zones mapped out in front of them, the conversation gets very concrete very quickly.

What’s happening internally will show up externally, eventually. Your gut health is one of the biggest drivers of systemic inflammation — which is why I talk to almost every patient about diet. Cutting back on processed foods, managing sugar, and adding fermented foods like kefir, kimchi, or kombucha makes a real difference. The treatments in the aesthetic room work better when the body underneath is in a good place.

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