Botox – What to expect following treatment

Adrian Richards, Leading Plastic Surgeon for Aurora Clinics explains what to expect following Botox treatment. For more information or should you wish to book a FREE Consultation with our specialist plastic surgeon, please call us on 01844 214362.

Botox – What to Expect Following Treatment

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon, and I’m the Medical Director of Aurora Clinics. Today I’m going to be talking, as part of the Botox series, of what to expect following treatment.

So Botox treatment is relatively safe. As I’ve mentioned it in other procedures, it does cause some discomfort, but it’s not normally too bad. Now, following treatment, what we’d like you to do is we like you to take it a little bit easy. We don’t like you to drink alcohol or exercise for three to four hours following surgery, and this is really because any exercise or alcohol can increase blood flow to the skin and potentially increase diffusion of the Botox away from where we want it to sit. So that’s for four hours.

We also like you to try and use the muscles slightly more than usual following the treatment. Not excessively so you frighten children or anything, but just gentle frowning, raising your eyebrows, and smiling. And that helps bind the Botox in its rightful position where we want it to be. So we ask you to do that every 10 minutes for an hour following surgery.

So, minimal discomfort. There may be slight swelling. Normally, that’s very subtle. You may get a bruise. Some patients get a bruise, and that’s just unfortunately, if we hit one of the very small blood vessels during treatment, you will get a little bruise, which is normally the size of a match head and a very small bruise which can be hidden with makeup and normally takes about a week to go. We can give you special cream, one we tend to use is Ori-Derm or Arnica, which help resolve the bruise slightly quicker. But if you do get a bruise, it’s important for you to know that it will be there for about a week.

So, will people know you’ve had Botox treatment? Normally, within an hour or so, once the tiny little marks have settled, covered with makeup, no they wouldn’t really know you’ve had a Botox treatment. You might initially with your first time in treatment get a slight, odd sensation in your forehead in the muscles treated in the next few days following treatment, which basically feels like something’s happening. It’s not uncomfortable. It’s not particularly swollen. It just feels like you’re aware something is happening in the area. Interestingly, that doesn’t happen normally on the subsequent treatments, only really on the first one.

Then over the first three or four days following treatment, you’ll just notice a slow decrease in your ability to frown and raise your forehead. So when you go to frown, you’ll be able to frown a little bit, but it just won’t be quite as strong as it was. So normally by a week, you’ll definitely notice activity. By two weeks, the Botox will have taken its full effect, and by that time, our aim is that you’ll look completely natural. Your frown is softened, so you can frown a little bit, but it’s much softer. You can raise your eyebrows absolutely as normal. You may have actually gotten some raise in the eyebrows to make the eyebrows look a slightly nicer position. But you’ll be able to raise your eyebrows.

You hopefully should have a slight decrease in the transverse folds across the forehead if you had them before. And if you’ve elected to have the crow’s feet area treated, when you smile, the smile lines will be softened. We don’t want them to go completely. We just want them softened. So, you should have a subtle improved appearance. It looks like if you have a sleep, if you have been on holiday, you look slightly fresher and healthier. You still look like you. We want you to still look like you. We don’t want you looking odd. Our aim is to make you look healthier and fresher but without creating anything too major or creating a paralyzed look.

So I hope that’s clarified some of the topics following Botox treatment. If you’d like any more information about Botox treatment or any of the other treatments offered by Aurora Clinics or just like to come and have a chat to us about the best way forward for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us either via our e-mail, via the website, or by phoning us on 01844 214362. Thank you very much.