Adrian Richards, Leading Plastic Surgeon for Aurora Clinics explains what happen once a patient stops having Botox treatments. 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 Happens If I Stop Having Treatment

Hello. My name is Adrian Richards. I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon, and I’m the Clinical Director of Aurora Clinics. So today I’m going to be talking about some of the myths or some of the questions I’m often asked about Botox treatment.

One of the first ones is what will happen if I stop having treatment, and the answer to this is you will revert back to your appearance now. So Botox typically works for three to four months. If you stop having treatment, your muscles will slowly recover back to normal activity. There won’t be any more than you had previously. Studies have shown that. But often people slightly forget how their muscles worked before the Botox treatment and can feel that they come back a bit stronger, but that normally isn’t the case. That’s one of the reasons we like to take photographs of you before treatment, just so that we can show you that. So, I like to dispel that myth that if you stop having treatment, everything will be worse, because it won’t.

One of the other things I often hear about Botox is that it makes my other lines worse. One of the problems with Botox is it is almost too effective. So in the area it works, the three main areas – between the eyebrows, across the forehead, and the crow’s feet area – it works very effectively. But it doesn’t work so well for the lower face, and in particular, it doesn’t work for lines which are down here, which are actually caused by the smile muscles, bysmiling, these lower lines. So obviously, we’re very reluctant or don’t want to reduce your ability to smile and move your mouth, so we can’t reduce these lines. Likewise, any lines on the lower eyelids, which are caused by gravity changes, excess skin, won’t be improved by Botox. Botox weakens the muscle. So it will only help the lines which are caused by muscle activity.

So, if you have an over-Botox treatment to these areas, you can look too smooth in these areas, and they won’t match your lower face. So you might have a forehead which looks completely line free, but that won’t match if you’ve got slight lines on your lower eyes and your lower cheeks. So Botox doesn’t make the other lines worse, but it can make them stand out more in that you look slightly unbalanced.

So that’s what’s important to really have a holistic treatment. So, Botox is good for reducing overactive lines, but we want you to remain natural looking. We don’t want you to look unbalanced. So, what we tend to do with faces when we see them is we analyze them in quadrants. In most people, it’s rare that the upper face completely matches the lower face. The aging problem may be more in the lower face, caused by volume loss, and that’s perhaps what we should address first. In other people, the aging changes are predominantly in the upper face and that’s perhaps what we should address first. So really, it’s about looking at your face, discussing it with you, working out which areas are perhaps the areas we need to treat first to try to create a harmonious appearance rather than create something that doesn’t look natural.

I hope that’s been helpful. If you have any queries about Botox or any other treatments offered by Aurora Clinics, please don’t hesitate to call us either by ringing us in the office on 01844 214362, or alternatively by inquiring via the website. Thank you very much.