Stand in front of a mirror, frown as hard as you can and take a photograph, then let your face go completely and take another one. Put those two side by side and you have a thoroughly convincing Botox before and after with no Botox in it anywhere.
The before that frowns, and the after that doesn't
Now, before you start feeling suspicious about the pictures you've been looking at, here's the reassuring part: nobody has to be up to anything for this to happen. It's something much more human than that.
Think about what you do when you show someone a line on your own face. You don't just point at it. You make it happen. You frown, so they can see the frown line, because a line you can barely find is very hard to talk about. Everybody does it, in every mirror and every consultation room, and you'd have a hard job explaining a frown line any other way.
So the moment somebody takes a "before", they're pointing a camera at a face busily demonstrating its own complaint. And the moment somebody takes an "after", they're pointing it at a face that's resting and rather pleased with itself. Nobody sat down and planned that. It's simply what people do at those two particular moments.
Look at what that pair is actually comparing, though. One face working, and the same face at rest. You proved about a minute ago that you can produce that difference yourself, for nothing, standing at a bathroom sink.
So you have your first question already, and the odd thing about it is that it isn't about the line at all. Is the face doing the same thing in both pictures? If it's frowning in one and resting in the other, then the expression has already explained the difference, and the treatment hasn't had to explain anything.
What an honest Botox before and after actually shows
Here's the odd conclusion that follows, and it takes a second to settle. In an honest pair, the person is frowning in both photographs.
That sounds backwards until you remember what the treatment does. Anti-wrinkle injections, the treatment everybody means by Botox®, relax the small facial muscles that crease the skin. The whole of the change happens while the muscle is working, so the only way a photograph can carry it is to catch the muscle working, twice, once before and once after.
And this is the bit worth having, because it turns the honest pair into the far more impressive one. In that second photograph the person is frowning just as hard as they were in the first, and the crease is softer anyway. Nothing was smoothed over on the surface. The muscle underneath eased off, so it isn't folding the skin as sharply as it used to, and there's less of a fold to see even at full effort.
That's a harder photograph to take and a much better one to look at. A resting after says the person stopped frowning. A frowning after says the frown itself has changed, which was the entire point of the exercise.
The "after" that was taken too early
Then there's the second question, and it's duller even than the first: how many days went by between the two photographs?
You already know how to think about this, because you've almost certainly waited for a photograph before. A Polaroid comes out of the camera as a blank grey square. Nobody has ever looked at one three seconds in, concluded the camera was broken and thrown it away; you put it in a pocket, talk to somebody for a few minutes, and by the time you look again the picture is there. It was always on its way. You were simply looking too early.
Anti-wrinkle injections keep their own version of that timetable. The full effect develops over about ten days as the treated muscles ease off, which means a photograph taken two days afterwards is a photograph of a face where the interesting part hasn't happened yet. What that photograph has caught is a result still on its way, so it sells the work short through nothing more than bad timing.
So the date is doing at least as much talking as the face is. Ten days is the number to hold anybody to, because ten days is the first moment there's a finished thing to photograph.
Why good Botox is so hard to photograph
Now for the part we find genuinely funny, in a rueful sort of way. The thing this treatment changes happens to be one of the very few a camera has no way of holding at all.
Somebody hands you a photograph of a clock on a wall. Now tell us, from that photograph alone, whether the clock is keeping perfect time or has been stopped since last Tuesday. You can't, and no amount of squinting will help you, because the only thing separating a running clock from a stopped one is movement, and there has never been a scrap of movement in a still photograph.
Faces are in the same boat. What people mean when they say somebody looks "done" is nearly always about movement: a forehead that has gone still, a face that arrives a beat late to its own expressions. And what people mean by a lovely result is also about movement: a face that frowns, laughs, raises its eyebrows and looks a bit fresher doing all of it. Those two outcomes are worlds apart in a room and very nearly the same photograph.
So the still picture, all by itself, can't tell you which of the two you're being shown. That's rotten luck for the treatment, and honestly it's rather a good sign about it, because the thing a photograph is failing to capture is precisely the thing you're hoping to keep.
It's also why the results that get noticed are so rarely the good ones. We've given that idea a piece of its own in why the frozen faces are the only ones you ever notice, and it's worth reading before you decide how much of anything you want.
What your own ten days would really look like
Which leaves the question you actually walked in with, and there's only one pair of photographs anywhere that answers it. Both halves of that pair are your own face, and neither one exists yet. So here's how those ten days would run.
They start before any needle appears, at a complimentary consultation. That's where we check the treatment suits you, watch how your face actually moves, and agree exactly which areas we're treating. Nothing is decided anywhere else, because the plan is a judgement about your face rather than a default.
The appointment is shorter than the conversation that decided it. The injections go into the muscles we agreed on, no anaesthetic is needed, any discomfort is brief and minimal, and you're typically out in around fifteen minutes with clear aftercare for the first hours and days. Then your afternoon carries on exactly as it was going to.
Day one and day two are your blank grey square. Squint at yourself all you like; there's nothing there yet to find, and going looking is the surest way to talk yourself into disappointment. Across the rest of the ten days the treated muscles gradually ease off, the skin stops being folded quite so hard every time you use it, and the lines soften as a result. At the end of them the treated areas feel smoother and look fresher, and that's your result.
If you'd like your own honest pair, your phone will do it perfectly well, and there are only two rules. Take the first one on the day of your appointment and the second at the end of your ten days, in the same light, and pull the same face in both. Frown in both, or raise your brows in both, whichever one makes the line you went in about. Same face, same light, ten days apart, and the line has nowhere left to hide, because it's the only thing in the frame you allowed to change.
The appointment where your result gets read properly
There's one more appointment in this story, and it's the one that answers the whole article.
We recommend a post-treatment appointment so we can assess your result together, and it lands right about where those ten days finish. What makes it worth keeping is exactly what a camera has been struggling with all the way down this page. In that room your face moves. You can frown at us, lift your brows, smile at something, and we can watch the actual result rather than a moment cut out of it.
That's the honest after, and it's a moving one. It's also where you get to say the useful things: that next time you'd like it a touch lighter somewhere, or that you'd rather keep more movement in one particular area. Until this appointment, everything anybody could have told you was a general truth about faces. After it, something is known about yours in particular, and that's what every appointment following this one gets planned from.
One standing thought while we're here, offered about any clinic you might be weighing up, this one included. A photograph has nothing at all to say about who will be holding the syringe, so ask that out loud. Anti-wrinkle injections have been performed for over twenty years, and the quality and the safety of what you get from them sit with that person. At Broadway Retreat every injectable is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and the consultation always comes first.
Bring the face that makes the line
If you've spent any part of this article pulling faces at yourself, hunting for a line you could find with your eyes shut, that's your answer about whether to ask. Arrange your consultation and bring the expression with you, not a description of it: pull the face that makes the line, and we'll tell you plainly what's causing it and what the injections would and wouldn't change for you. If something else would serve you better, you'll hear that just as plainly.
No photograph of somebody else's forehead was ever going to answer the question you came in with. Yours can, and it takes about ten days and a mirror you already own.