A very fine needle, a few quick pinpricks in each area being treated, and a sting most people describe as sharp for a second and then finished. That's the whole answer, and everything under it is the reasoning: why no anaesthetic is used, which areas tend to be felt more, and what you notice for the rest of the day.
What one injection actually is
One injection is the unit everything else here is made of, so it's the thing to describe first.
The needle used for anti-wrinkle injections — Botox® is the name nearly everyone gives them — is a very fine one, and each injection is a single quick pass of it into the muscle beneath the skin. People commonly describe it as a sharp little sting, or simply a pinprick: sharp while it happens, and then genuinely over. Each area takes a few of them, placed where your face was judged to need them, and every one is its own second rather than part of a longer stretch.
If you'd like something to measure that against, there's the little shock you get off a car door on a cold, dry day. Sharp from nowhere, done before you've properly flinched, and nothing left behind: you shut the door and carry on with your morning. Take the shape of that rather than the size, mind — a car door can genuinely make you jump, and a fine needle is commonly described as the smaller of the two.
One thing about the comparison is wrong, and it's wrong in the direction that helps. A shock off a car door arrives unannounced and buys you nothing. These seconds are expected, they belong to a plan you agreed to, and each one is placing the thing you came in for.
Why the appointment is minutes and the sting is seconds
Most of the dread here comes from pricing the treatment in the wrong unit, so it's worth swapping the unit before you decide anything.
The appointment typically takes around fifteen minutes, and almost none of those minutes has a needle in it. There's settling into the chair, going back over the areas agreed at your consultation, a short spell of injecting, and then you're sitting up again with your aftercare for the first hours and days. The injecting is the brief part of an already brief appointment.
Which means the sensation you're actually weighing up is a handful of separate seconds spread thinly through a quarter of an hour, and they are not joined together. That matters more than it sounds. What people picture when they picture pain is a stretch of time to be got through, and this simply isn't that shape: each sting has finished before the next one starts, and what sits in the gaps is ordinary appointment time.
Why no anaesthetic is used, and why that isn't toughing it out
No anaesthetic is necessary for this treatment, and any discomfort is brief and minimal. That first half unsettles people until they've seen the reasoning, at which point it stops sounding like something being withheld from them.
An anaesthetic always costs something, and what it costs is time. It has to be put on or put in, and then it has to be waited for, which makes numbing these seconds a considerably longer business than the seconds themselves. The needle is fine enough and each pass quick enough that there's nothing here that warrants it.
It's the same reason nobody puts a coat on to take the bins to the end of the drive. Finding the coat, finding the second glove, getting boots on — all of that takes longer than being outside does, so you go out as you are. That's not a question of what anybody can stand; it's proportion, and it's the whole of what's meant by no anaesthetic being needed.
If needles are genuinely hard going for you, that's a separate thing with its own answer, and it's further down this page.
The areas people tend to notice more
Your face isn't equally sensitive all over, and nobody's is, so the same fine needle does read differently depending on where it goes.
You already know this from splinters. One in a fingertip announces exactly where it is and you could point to it with your eyes shut; the same splinter in a knee is a vague nuisance you'd have to go hunting for. Nothing about the splinter changed. Your body doesn't spread its nerve endings evenly, and it puts a great many of them where it needs to feel in detail.
That's what decides the map on a face. The skin around the upper lip carries a great many nerve endings for its size, which is why a bitten lip smarts out of all proportion to the damage, and it's the area people most commonly describe as the sharper one. The other area people tend to mention is between the brows. The forehead sits at the opposite end: it's the area people most often say they barely noticed at all.
Take that as a general map rather than a warning, and yours might not follow it. Where it earns its keep is before the appointment rather than during it: if one of those areas is on your plan, it's a fair thing to raise while you're still agreeing what to treat.
What you feel for the rest of the day
The needle is the part everybody asks about, and it's over first. What comes after it is milder, longer, and hardly ever described in advance.
Once the injecting is done, most people describe a mild tightness across the treated area, and sometimes a dull ache at the points themselves — more noticeable if you press on it than if you leave it alone. There are usually small raised bumps and a few pink dots at the injection points afterwards, and Botox aftercare explains what they are, how long they tend to sit there, and the reasoning behind every instruction you leave with.
What you won't feel is the treatment working. The full effect develops over about ten days, and not one day of that announces itself as a sensation, which is why the first days show you nothing. So the rest of your day carries on exactly the way it was going to.
What makes it easier, and what to say before anybody starts
Three things make a difference here, and all three of them are things you do rather than things anybody hands you.
Let your face be still rather than tensed. Waiting hard for something small is most of what makes it feel big, and a face held rigid is a face concentrating on every point in turn. Breathing out as each one goes in costs you nothing.
Ask what the order is. Which area is first, and roughly how many points it takes. Nothing here is a surprise unless you're left to guess at it, and being told is the difference between counting down a known number and waiting for an unknown one.
Say out loud that you don't like needles. Say it at the consultation, before anything is agreed. It's an ordinary thing to say and nobody thinks anything of it — what it changes is the pace of the appointment, and how much gets explained before it happens rather than after.
That pace, and where every point goes, comes down to the person holding the syringe — which is the thing worth asking wherever you go: who will be treating you, and what are they qualified to do. Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is given by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and a consultation always comes first.
Ask how many, and where
If this is the question keeping you from booking, the useful version of it is the one about your own face rather than about faces in general.
Arrange a complimentary consultation. That's where we check the treatment suits you, watch how your face actually moves, and agree exactly which areas we'd treat — and once that plan exists, you can ask how many injections it involves and whereabouts they'd go, which is the part that depends entirely on your face. The anti-wrinkle injections page has the fuller picture, and if it's the visit itself rather than the needle giving you pause, what happens at a consultation walks you through the door.
Put it together and what you've actually been weighing up comes to a few seconds of a fifteen-minute appointment. The rest of it is a conversation, and that's the part to arrange first.