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What is Botox and What Can It Do for You

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With the endless amounts of skin care products, serums, creams, and treatments available to us that help eliminate and prevent wrinkles, Botox is not a foreign term to most of us. Botox is well-known for preventing, reducing, and eliminating fine lines and wrinkles and has become a widespread treatment across the globe, particularly in large metropolitan cities such as New York city and Los Angeles. Cosmetic dermatology clinics located in these cities, such as Skinly Aesthetics (www.skinlyaesthetics.com) medspa in NYC, have been growing increasingly popular due to the high demand for this rejuvenating treatment.

Aside from the obvious benefit of eliminating lines and wrinkles from your face, Botox’s physical effects may also rub off on your self confidence. Looking and feeling good about yourself is incredibly important for your mental health. So, if we think about it, Botox has an even greater effect on your mentality than it does on your face. This is why you can ask Botox doctors about their work and they will tell you that a big part of what they do is build up a rapport with the patients. It’s important that they know exactly what they are getting themselves into and what they should expect from the treatment. They take pride in the work they do not only in terms of their successful treatments but also in the great communication they have with their clients. This is why they are providing us with some crucial information on Botox so we can share with you all the nuances that will hopefully help you understand what the treatment is and how it can potentially help you. 

What Botox Actually Does 

With all the celebrity gossip and the many times that you hear about Botox in mainstream media, you’d think that almost everyone has a general idea of what the treatment is and what it actually accomplishes. But this simply isn’t the case today.

It’s not even a matter of most people not knowing what Botox is or what it does, but rather most people only know false rumors and gossip. This leads them to have a very false understanding of what Botox is.

Ask the people around you and they’ll most likely say that Botox is something that puffs you up and makes you look plastic. But if they knew what the procedure actually does they would understand that this is not at all how Botox works. 

Sure, there are treatments like dermal fillers which lift up the skin to make it tighter. They work directly in the subcutaneous tissues to smooth out wrinkles and other age marks. Botox works on a much deeper level. Instead of targeting your skin, it targets the source of the wrinkles themselves. Age marks are typically formed by the muscles of your face constantly contracting. This is not a result of your actions and happens naturally with everyone over time.

The essence of Botox is to numb the muscles in order to stop these contractions. The botulinum toxin has the ability to numb certain nerves when injected. When it is injected into key areas of the face, it numbs the muscles and the contractions stop. As a result, the wrinkles on the surface of the skin smooth out.

What This Means for the Patient 

So, that’s great and all but what is the benefit for the patient here? Quite a lot, actually. First and foremost: the results. Botox does not get rid of wrinkles entirely, but don’t let yourself believe that it accomplishes nothing. It accomplishes quite a lot as the wrinkles seem to fade. Sure there is a very faint trace of their presence, but it is definitely a lot more deemphasized and far less visible.

This is what gives Botox its signature authentic results. It does not make you bloated or plastic-like certain other anti-aging cosmetic treatments. It takes a more nuanced approach to smooth out wrinkles and accomplishes this more subtly. But even these subtle results are very much visible and you can easily tell the difference when looking at the before and after photos.

Another major advantage to Botox is that since it uses injections, it is minimally invasive. This means that minimal damage is done to your body, and more specifically the skin. Other than making the procedure less painful and much easier to get through, the advantages of minimally-invasive treatments like Botox show themselves post-treatment more so than during the procedure.

With the damage being only a few microscopic holes, your body will have no trouble recovering from the procedure as it can heal up these holes almost instantaneously. This means that the recovery time is going to be shorter and less painful than those of more complicated procedures which involve incisions and cuts, as well as stitches to follow.

The Botox Procedure

This then begs the question: what is the procedure like? Sure, getting injected is safer and less painful than having your face cut all over with a scalpel, but an injection into the face is still an injection into the face. It’s bound to be somewhat painful, right?

Qualified practitioners have likely performed hundreds, if not thousands of injections and they know that injections do hurt. It is completely natural to feel it. So, obviously, they use local anesthetic to numb the area and keep the patient from feeling any discomfort throughout the procedure. As scary as injections can be for some people, at the very least the only thing you will feel throughout the 30-minute procedure is a very light prick from the needle.

This makes the procedure very easy to get through and most patients return to their normal way of life immediately following the treatment. The only thing that will be asked of you is to avoid extreme temperatures, especially if it’s summer or winter. Also, you will have to avoid consuming alcohol for 48 hours. And in general, avoid putting pressure on your face or touching it too much for the first couple of days. You can find more information about Botox post care by clicking here.

After that, as the results from the treatment set in, you will see your wrinkles gradually disappear and the face will look noticeably younger, full of energy, and very vibrant.