Botox®

The best candidates for BOTOX Cosmetic treatments are people plagued by dynamic wrinkles. When you smile, frown, squint, or make other expressions, if the muscle contractions create crow’s feet at the outside of your eyes or the 11s between your eyebrows, then BOTOX Cosmetic injections are the perfect way to erase these wrinkles for a period of 4-6 months.

However, if you have lines from your nose stretching down to your mouth (nasolabial folds) or parentheses lines around your mouth, these are static wrinkles, and BOTOX Cosmetic will not help with those. You need dermal fillers such as Juvederm or Restylane to fill static wrinkles.

Patients who are pregnant or breastfeeding should not have BOTOX injections as it is unknown how botulinum toxin products may affect the baby.

Dr. Gill injects BOTOX Cosmetic with a very tiny needle. Most patients equate the feeling of these injections to a pinprick. For that reason, we usually don’t use numbing cream on the injection sites. However, if you would like to have numbing cream, of course, we’re happy to provide that for you.

Yes, BOTOX has undergone numerous clinical trials and is considered safe. People sometimes worry about injecting botulinum toxin (basically what BOTOX is made of) into their skin. Scientists first discovered back in the 1950s that when the botulinum toxin is injected in minute amounts, it does nothing more than temporarily stop a muscle from contracting.

This is how BOTOX Cosmetic stops dynamic wrinkles from forming during muscle contractions. Since its approval in 2002, BOTOX Cosmetic has been used hundreds of millions of times around the world, with very few side effects of any sort.

The skill of the healthcare provider is important to ensure BOTOX Cosmetic is injected into the correct muscle. That’s where the providers at Naples Aesthetic Institute’s extensive understanding of facial anatomy and experience with BOTOX Cosmetic comes into play.

An inexperienced injector can inject the BOTOX into an incorrect muscle, or it may migrate, leading to temporary problems such as a droopy eyelid.

Common side effects include temporary redness at the injection sites and possibly some slight swelling. This passes quickly. Otherwise, it’s important not to rub your injection sites for the first 24 hours after your BOTOX Cosmetic session. Rubbing the sites can make the BOTOX migrate to an unwanted muscle.

While rare, more serious side effects of BOTOX include dry mouth, neck pain, allergic reactions, eye problems like double vision, drooping eyelids, dry eyes, and trouble swallowing.⁵ Patients suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS may have an increased risk of developing these side effects.

In addition to cosmetic uses, injections of botulinum toxin have a range of medical uses. An injection of BOTOX can treat medical conditions including excessive sweating, severe underarm sweating (hyperhidrosis), chronic migraine, and certain neurological conditions that cause overactive bladder, cervical dystonia, loss of bladder control or urinary incontinence, blepharospasm, muscle spasms, upper limb spasticity, and strabismus.

These three injectables are all botulinum neurotoxins. BOTOX is largely considered the “gold standard” of wrinkle-reducing treatments, but they all work by causing temporary paralysis of the facial muscles that cause facial wrinkling.