Botox – How long will it last and how often will I need treatment

Adrian Richards, Leading Plastic Surgeon for Aurora Clinics explains how long Botox will last and how often Wrinkle Reducing Treatments are needed. For more information or should you wish to book a FREE Consultation with our specialist plastic surgeon, please call us on 01844 214362.

Botox – How Long Will It Last

Hello. My name’s Adrian Richards, and I’m a plastic and cosmetic surgeon. I’m the Medical Director of Aurora Clinics. Today I’m going to be talking a little bit about Botox as part of our series of videos on Botox. I’m going to be talking, discussing how long Botox should last and how long between treatments.

Botox, as I mentioned before, is a substance, which injected near the muscles, selectively weakens overactive muscles. With muscle activity, we normally notice some . . . well, in the first few days you may notice a slightly odd feeling in the muscles, like you’re aware something is going on. It’s not uncomfortable, but you know something’s going on. This particularly happens on the first treatment. On subsequent treatments, you don’t notice it quite as much.

You should notice a decrease in muscle activity really within five or six days, sometimes earlier. By a week, you certainly should have noticed something, and by two weeks you won’t get any more activity. Botox would have fully worked by two weeks, and that’s why this is often the time, if we do need to see you again, would like to see you to slightly adjust treatment until we get the perfect recipe for you.

What we tend to do is give you treatment, and we’re always learning what the recipe for you is because everyone’s different. Everyone requires slightly different treatments. We get to know that with time.

How will it work after that? We normally say three months. By three months, it’s likely that the activity may be beginning to wear off, or if it hasn’t started to wear off, it will do soon. What we like you to do is rather than wait for the Botox to completely wear off and all the frown lines to come and start folding the skin, we like to repeat the treatment certainly within the year, before the muscle activities come back.

What we like to encourage you to do is to have four treatments within the first year. If we can do four treatments in the first year, separated at three monthly intervals, even the deepest wrinkles will go. They won’t go if you have treatment and then three months later, you’re on holiday. It’s difficult to get the treatment and you start folding the lines again. You’re back to square one. We like four treatments within the first year.

Then we can basically get the overactive muscles decreasing activity and create a balanced look and even the deepest wrinkles will go. Interestingly, if you can have a treatment, four treatments in the first year, often you need much less treatment subsequently because the muscle’s been weakened and actually your nerve impulses have change slightly. So the nerves tend to not innervate the same muscles. Most patients who have had Botox for a year need less Botox in the future and slightly less often. Often the treatment, you might go to four months, six months. Often patients have much longer between treatments if you get that first year under your belt.

Again, just to emphasise, upper face Botox is a very safe treatment. There are a lot of sort of misconceptions about it in the press that it’s going to make you more wrinkly, that you’re going to be frozen. These really aren’t true if done by experienced and responsible practitioners. But it is important to consider that it’s not just a one-off treatment. It should be a part of a program of treatments really to get the best results. Thank you for watching the video. If you’ve got any questions regarding treatment or any of the other treatments offered by Aurora Clinics, please don’t hesitate to contact me either via phone at my office on 01844 214362, or by e-mail via the website. Thank you.