The minor discomfort of a Botox injection is minimal and brief. Prior to your treatment, your skin can be numbed with a cold pack or topical anesthetic cream.
While Botox is approved by the FDA, it can pose a risk to your eyes if used by inexperienced injectors. The skin and muscles around the eyes are incredibly delicate; if too much Botox is used or its injected in the wrong place, it's easy for patients to experience problems.
By targeting muscle weakness, Botox can help to tighten the skin around the eyes. Apart from helping with facial lines and forehead wrinkles caused by sun damage and aging, botox works as an eye treatment for dark circles. It can help improve these circles caused by lack of sleep or poor blood flow in the area.
Specifically, injections on the forehead or between the eyes may spread into the eyebrows and cause the brow to lower, causing a droopy eyelid. In most cases, droopy eyelid occurs between one and three weeks after treatment, and patients typically experience this adverse effect for just a few weeks.
"Botox in the crow's feet can help reduce the tension around the eyes and relax the wrinkles, which can help improve the appearance but will not remove the eye bag," Dr. Shafer says. Like filler, Botox is only temporary and will need to be injected every three to six months to maintain results.
When people see lines forming after BOTOX wears off, they assume treatment made their wrinkles worse. Actually, your face simply returns back to its natural state. No new wrinkles or lines are ever caused by these injections.
Does Botox tighten the skin around your eyes? Botox tightens sagging skin wherever it is injected, including around the eyes. It relaxes the nearby muscles, which helps to reduce and prevent wrinkles. The overall effect is to create the appearance of tighter, younger skin.
Botox under the eyes (tear trough)
The muscle that is injected is the same muscle that partially controls the lower eyelid. If too much is used, or the injection is placed incorrectly, it may lead to a drop of the lower eyelid.
Botox Cosmetic can affect the muscles that control your eyelids, so you might blink less after your injections. This can result in problems such as dry eye, eye irritation, or eye damage. Chronically dry eyes can lead to a scratched cornea.
In the unlikely chance that this happens, you'll usually see signs of eyelid droop a few days to a week after you get a neurotoxin. They may be subtle at first and include: Eye heaviness. There's a heavy feeling in your eyelid that gets worse throughout the day.
"If you do too much Botox on your forehead for many, many years, the muscles will get weaker and flatter," cautions Wexler, adding that the skin can also appear thinner and looser. Moreover, as your muscles become weaker, they can start to recruit surrounding muscles when you make facial expressions.
It's generally recommended that your professional inject 1-2 units of Botox in the undereye area. This can help provide a smoothing appearance, without running the risk of baggy and droopy results.
Sometimes Botox can help with hooded eyes, but not always. If you have significant sagging and drooping upper lid skin that affects the vision, you need something else. The bottom line is no injectable will tighten drooping and sagging skin permanently. The only option in this situation is upper eyelid surgery.
After the Botox is injected, the eyes can become very irritated and dry, and can go quite bloodshot and red. This irritation can then increase into blurred vision and the inability to see correctly.
According to Dr Gavin Chan, one of the most important things practitioners can do is to, “inject the lateral tail of the corrugator which is the muscle which causes the bunching (6.35) of the frown. Superficially injecting the lateral tail of the frown (corrugator) muscle can help avoid ptosis”.
Although Botox can lift jowls, its effectiveness really does depend on the extent of the sagging. If you have large drooping jowls then Botox is unlikely to give you the results that you desire. In such cases, you really would be better off considering a surgical procedure.
Can I sleep on my side after having Botox®? Yes, provided you wait at least four hours before lying down. Botox® takes a few hours to settle into place, so lying down straightaway could cause it to migrate to other muscles in your face and increase the risk of complications.
The risk of bruising following Botox is increased when the body or face gets too hot. In addition to avoiding hot tubs, saunas, and other similar places, do not take a hot bath or shower for at least 24 hours after having this treatment.
Even if you received a low dose or worked with an experienced injector, this can still happen. It's important to remember that the sensation of heaviness in your eyelids will gradually improve every two weeks until it has fully lightened back to baseline.
Possible side effects and unwanted results include: Pain, swelling or bruising at the injection site. Headache or flu-like symptoms. Droopy eyelids or crooked eyebrows.
If you use Botox for ten or more years, your skin will appear brighter and smoother with fewer wrinkles. Even after stopping Botox injections after years of use, you'll still notice fewer wrinkles between your eyes or on your forehead, which means you'll continue to age gracefully.