You've been given a short list of things not to do this afternoon, and a list like that is very hard to hold on to when nobody has said what it's for. So here is what yours is protecting, because once you can see that, every rule on it explains itself.
What those first few hours are protecting
Anti-wrinkle injections — Botox® is the name nearly everyone uses for them — relax the small facial muscles that crease the skin. At your consultation somebody watched your face move, and the areas to treat were agreed on the strength of it. That plan is the whole of your result: it decides which lines ease and which movement you keep.
Over the first few hours, what was placed is gradually taken up right where it went in. Until that has happened, a little of it can still spread beyond the point it was aimed at.
Think of gluing the handle back onto a mug. All the skill is in the lining up, and for the first few minutes the join can still slide: nudge it, or stand the mug on its side, and it sets a couple of millimetres out of true, which was the one thing that mattered. Leave it standing still and it takes hold exactly where you put it, and after that you can wash it and knock it about and it stays.
That's your afternoon. Every rule on the list has the same job: leave what was placed exactly where it was placed, for as long as it can still move.
Straight afterwards: rubbing, lying flat and make-up
Don't rub, press or massage the treated area. Rubbing is the most direct way to shift what was placed, and most of it happens without you noticing: a hand propping up your forehead while you read, sunglasses pushed onto the brow, the habit of pinching between your eyebrows when you're concentrating.
Stay upright for the first few hours, rather than lying flat. The same reason with gravity added, and it's why the afternoon nap is better taken as an early night.
If you're going straight out, put your make-up on gently. Dab rather than rub over the treated area.
Everything else goes on as normal. You can drive, go back to work, and pull whatever faces the conversation calls for; nobody books the day off for this.
Four hours is the figure most often given for all of that, and plenty of clinics say longer. Yours came with its own version, and that's the one to go by.
The rest of the day: exercise, heat and a glass of wine
The hard session is better tomorrow, for two plain reasons. A great deal of exercise is spent flat, face-down or bent over, which is the same problem as lying down; and it sends more blood to the skin of your face, which makes the small marks from the needle likelier to show.
Saunas, steam rooms, hot yoga, sunbeds and a very hot bath can wait a day. Anything that turns you pink is doing it by bringing blood up close to the surface, and skin that has just had fine needles through it marks more readily while there's more blood sitting there.
The glass of wine is worth leaving until tomorrow, and the reason is bruising again. Alcohol has the same relaxing effect on those fine vessels that heat does, and a vessel sitting open is one that gives up a little more blood if the needle went near it.
All of that is one evening rather than a change to your life. By tomorrow, every one of them is back on the table.
Swelling after Botox: the small bumps at each point
What most people mean by swelling here is the little raised bumps sitting at each injection point when you look in the mirror on the way out. A small amount of liquid was just placed there, so the skin above it stands up a little until that liquid disperses — usually a matter of minutes, sometimes an hour or so. The few pink dots where the needle went in are the same story on a smaller scale, and they fade the same way.
If yours are still there at bedtime, or there's more of it than you were expecting, ring us and describe it. We have a record of what was placed and where, which is what makes that a short call rather than a long evening.
Botox bruising: what it is, and what actually helps
A bruise at an injection point comes from the needle rather than from what the needle was carrying, and the difference matters more than it sounds.
Your skin has very fine blood vessels running all the way through it, and there's no seeing them from the outside. Most of the time a needle passes between them. Now and again it clips one, a small amount of blood ends up where it wasn't meant to be, and what you're left with is the same sort of mark you'd get from catching your arm on the corner of a kitchen drawer: it darkens, it works through its colours, and it goes.
None of that touches your result. The bruise is blood sitting under the skin, and the treatment is happening underneath it, in the muscle.
Some areas mark more readily than others, and it comes down to what's under the skin there. The skin around the eyes is thin, with fine vessels sitting close to the surface, so crow's feet bruise more easily than a forehead does. Worth knowing when you're choosing a date. If there's a morning you'd rather not be covering anything up, book well clear of it rather than a few days before.
Then there's arnica, which nearly everybody asks about and which deserves an honest answer. Plenty of people use the cream or the tablets and find them reassuring. What we can't tell you is that it will shorten anything, because a bruise largely fades at its own pace whatever goes on it. Two things are worth doing anyway: something cool rested gently against the area on the first day — rested there rather than pressed or rubbed — and concealer, which does nothing to the bruise and everything to whether anybody notices it.
One genuinely useful thing is telling us. If you know you bruise easily, or you take any medicine at all, say so at the consultation — we ask anyway, and the answer is worth having.
The days after, and what you can get straight back to
Nearly all of ordinary life is back the next morning: work, washing your face the way you always do, the gym.
One thing is worth holding back longer, for the same reason as the first afternoon: facials, face massage and skin treatments over the treated area all work by pressing and moving the skin, so they sit better once we've seen you. And if you had lip filler at the same visit, that carries a list of its own, which lip filler aftercare sets out.
The other thing to leave alone is the mirror, and that one is for your sake rather than the result's. The full effect develops over about ten days, and there is nothing useful to be read off it before then; why the first days show nothing is a piece of its own, taking your own before and after has a right way to do it, and how long the finished result holds is a different question again.
The appointment where your aftercare ends
We recommend a post-treatment appointment so we can go over your result together, and it sits at the far end of those ten days, by which point there is no aftercare left to follow.
That appointment does more than settle the result. It's the natural moment to mention that one point bruised, or that one side feels different from the other, or that you'd want something done differently if there's a next time. Every one of those is useful to us, and not one of them is a fussy thing to bring up.
And there's something to be said here about this page, and about any other page like it. Aftercare is only as good as the person who wrote it for your face, so the instructions to follow are the ones you were given by whoever treated you, including anywhere they differ from what's written here. Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is given by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester.
Ask us before, and ring us after
If you're reading this before your appointment rather than after it, that's the better time, and the useful thing to bring with you is your diary.
Arrange a consultation and we'll go through the aftercare while you're still deciding rather than at the end, so you'll know exactly what this afternoon would look like before you agree to anything. The anti-wrinkle injections page has the fuller picture, and what happens at a consultation covers the first visit.
And if you've already had yours and something is on your mind this evening, ring us on 0161 526 2232. Describe what you're looking at, we'll tell you whether it's the ordinary thing or worth us seeing, and you get your evening back either way.