Intense Pulsed Light (IPL) Treatment

In September I underwent a dermatological procedure called Intense Pulsed Light therapy.  Specific wavelengths of light are at targeted at various chromophores in the skin.  A chromophore is the part of a molecule responsible for its color. The color comes about when a molecule absorbs certain wavelengths of visible light and reflects or transmits others. The treatment is done over the entire surface of the face if there are a lot of brown spots, which was the case for me.

Here is a picture of how my face looked before the treatment.

I am 41 and have had great skin all my life.  I have not been a sun worshiper. My mother and aunt also have dark spots so a large part of the issue is genetic.  On the day of the appointment I sat for 30 minutes with numbing cream on my face and then a specialist performed the IPL therapy, which took 15 minutes.  From what i had read on the internet I expected the sensation during the therapy to feel like an elastic snapping onto my face.  It felt to me more like splatters of hot oil.  Afterwards my face was on fire.  What helped tremendously was applying aloe gel all over my face then sitting where the ceiling fan could blow on my face.  The pain lasted about 2 hours. This is a picture taken as soon as I got home from the therapy.

The next day my face was a mess of brown spots and the day after that even more. After 4 days I was thinking I would be living with dark brown spots on my face but then around day 6 my face started looking clearer.

Day after therapy this is what I looked like. There is absolutely no pain, however not looking so pretty.

Two days after there is a little bit of improvement. 

4 days afterwards I'm starting to get excited about the results.

6 days afterwards I am very pleased with how my skin looks.

12 days.  These are the results that I am left with (or so I think) and I can't be happier.

Great results, right?  My skin is smooth, bright, young looking.  However less than a month later I started seeing brown spots popping up again. Obviously it's not as bad as it was to begin with and I did expect some spots to return since the dermatologist advised me that they would, however they should not have started appearing until at least 9-12 months from the treatment.  I returned to the dermatologist and was told that the spots were actually tumors called keratoses that go deep down into many many layers of my skin.  There is a different treatment for these. It targets the spots individually with an intense light just like IPL,  however it pulses rapidly about three times on the one spot.  The results for this treatment are supposed to last much much longer with this treatment. I wondered why the dermatologist didn't just do this treatment instead of the IPL. She said that the IPL gets rid of the sunspots and then if there are brown spots left behind then they know those aren't caused by the sun and they are then targeted with this other treatment.  I think I may just wait a year and do the treatment at that time because I expected to have an IPL treatment completed again at that time.  In the meantime I am using retinol creams (skin tightener, skin brightener) Neutrogena 30 spf sunscreen aging cream, a 27% vitamin C serum plus CC cream and foundation.  If you have had skin treatments, what have your results been? What products do you swear by?