going dotty; Sick of the sun spots speckling her hands (and arms, ankles, knees, and-yikes-face), Susan Lehman plans her attack.(lentigos)

Byline: Susan Lehman

Spots. I have them on my hands. Little spots. Big spots. Fish-shaped spots, plum-shaped spots, spots that look like dirty little moons. They cropped up during the summer. (Or was it before?) I hate them.

My dermatologist, Heidi Waldorf, M.D., tells me the spots are lentigos. This sounds like something French people might put in salads and seems too nice a word for hand dots. But, Waldorf says, "what we call freckles when they show up on children's noses are lentigos on adults. There are differences under the microscope, but basically they're the same thing." Except they don't fade at summer's end; they sit there: brown, blotchy reminders we were not as diligent with sunscreen as we might have been.

Sun spots. Age spots. Liver spots. People call them all kinds of things, but most, says Waldorf, are solar lentigos like mine. They have nothing to do with livers, with drinking, or with nerves. Most come solely from the sun. Genetics play a backup role, as some skin types-usually lighter, paler-complected-are more freckle-friendly. To my mind, the most interesting thing that Waldorf says about lentigos is that she can remove them with a high-powered laser.

She'll target each "discrete spot" (not discrete enough for my taste, thank you) and blast it with 532 nanometers of high-intensity light waves. The extra pigment that (when stimulated by UV radiation) originally brought the spot into being absorbs the light, turns into pigment-shattering heat, and . . . zap. Goodbye. The spot is burned out of existence. The former spot site will get scabby, but if I stay out of the sun, it will be gone forever.

Waldorf, who heads the laser and cosmetic dermatology department at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, looks like Meryl Streep, with skin so clear I think I can see through it. She says she can laser off face dots (face dots! I'm scared to look!) and that this treatment-thank God-leaves only a delicate mar, "like a thin fall leaf," which will go away without a trace after a few days.

The entire experience is quick, relatively painless, and, assuming proper sun precaution afterward, permanent. "A nice treatment." That's what my doctor calls laser spot removal, the one and only known procedure that can undo sun damage. Oh, did I mention that it's relatively inexpensive? For a few hundred bucks, I will be able to look at my hands without ever having to think about Georges Seurat, the pointillist painter, again.