The word needle is doing a great deal of damage here, and it does it before anybody has told you what actually happens in the room. So here's the honest version first: most people describe pressure and a fine scratchy vibration travelling over the skin, and the sharp single jab you're picturing belongs to a completely different sort of appointment.
What microneedling actually feels like
Start with what you're imagining, because that's the thing to take apart first. What most people have in mind is one needle, going into one place, with all their attention narrowed onto that single point — and a picture that specific is hard to be calm about. That isn't the shape of this at all.
Our EDS Regenerate treatment is an electronic micro-needling procedure, and it creates thousands of microscopic columns in the skin: points far finer than anything you could see, in and out quickly, one after another across the part of your face being treated. Fineness and speed change a sensation far more than the word needle lets you guess.
So pressure is what most people call it afterwards, with a fine scratchy vibration they could trace around their own face. Something is plainly happening, you always know exactly where it's happening, and sharp is rarely the word that comes out. Nobody can promise you how yours will go, though. Skin varies from person to person, and the only skin that can settle this properly is your own.
And it's a practical question rather than a nervous one: knowing what an hour will feel like is how anybody decides whether to spend it.
Why it feels different depending on where we're working
Here's the part nobody warns you about, and it explains why one person calls this nothing much and the next one calls it sharp.
Try it on yourself while you're reading. Run a comb over the flat of your palm and you get a soft drag with no detail in it. Run the same comb over your knuckles and you feel every tooth separately, and it's sharper by a distance. Same comb, same hand, same pressure. All that changed is what sat underneath: a palm has padding that gives way and spreads the load about, and a knuckle has thin skin with bone directly beneath it and nothing to give at all.
Your face is made of both kinds, and you can find them with your fingers. Press your forehead, your jaw, the bridge of your nose, the edge of your hairline: those are the knuckles of your face, with almost nothing between skin and bone, and they're the parts people most often single out, some of them saying the buzz seems to carry on into the bone. Press a cheek and it moves under your finger. That's the palm, and it's the part people tend not to mention at all.
Which is worth knowing before you sit down, because it stops you drawing the wrong conclusion halfway through. If the forehead feels sharper than the cheek did, nothing has gone wrong and nothing has been turned up. You've simply arrived at a bonier part of your own face.
Why the depth changes how much you feel
Depth is a setting rather than a fixed property of the treatment, and it's the other half of the answer.
Each of those microscopic columns is a passage down through the skin, so a deeper setting means a longer passage through more of it. More skin involved means more to feel, and the deeper end is commonly reported as more noticeable than the shallow end, on the same face in the same session.
The setting is chosen for what we're treating, not for how much anybody can put up with. There's an idea going about that the more you feel, the better the result, and it has things the wrong way round. Feeling more tells you a deeper setting was used, and a deeper setting is a decision made about your skin rather than a prize for sitting still.
So the useful answer to "how will it feel" comes from whoever has looked at your skin and decided what they're doing on it. Your consultation is where the treatment is confirmed as right for your skin and your goals, and it's the place to ask where we'd be working and how deep.
What the first hour afterwards feels like
Then the device stops, and the feeling changes completely. Most people expect this to be where the discomfort starts, and it isn't.
Immediately afterwards your skin looks and feels as though it has caught moderate sun: warm and tight. That settles within a couple of hours, and your skin returns to normal within a day or two. It isn't the ache of something having been done to you. It's the ordinary warmth of an afternoon spent outdoors, and it fades like one.
What comes after that first hour — the evening, the dry flaky stage, and the honest downtime — is a separate question with its own answer, and our microneedling aftercare piece gives it properly.
Is microneedling safe?
This question usually arrives in the same breath as the first one, and it has two parts to it: the device, and the person deciding what to do with it.
Take the device first. That depth setting from a moment ago is chosen before anything touches you, and it stays where it was put — the same at the end of a pass as at the start. It doesn't creep up because somebody leaned harder. That's the plain difference between an electronic device and a hand-held roller taken to your own face at the bathroom mirror, where the depth is whatever your arm is doing from one stroke to the next.
Then there's the part no device can supply. Someone chooses that depth, chooses the area, and decides whether you should be having this at all, and that judgement is where the safety actually lives. Every treatment at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester. Your consultation comes before any of it, and its job is to confirm the treatment suits your skin and your goals, which sometimes means hearing that it doesn't.
A few things are worth putting on the table when we look at your skin, and they're conversation rather than warning.
Active acne. Acne that's still going and the scarring it leaves behind are two different situations, and they aren't answered by the same plan. Tell us which one you've got, and if it's both, say that too. If it's the marks that brought you here, our piece on microneedling for acne scars covers which kinds improve most and which improve least.
Skin that heals by over-building. Some people scar by making too much rather than too little, which is keloid scarring: a healed mark that stands proud of the skin around it rather than level with it. This treatment asks your skin to build, so if that's how yours has behaved before, we'd far rather know at the start than later.
Anything going on now, and anything you're using. A flare-up, an infection, a cold sore, a medicine you take, a product you're putting on the area. Skin conditions and medicines can change what skin does with a treatment, and none of it is awkward to say — it's precisely what the appointment is for.
The picture that puts people off
Somewhere behind this question there's usually a photograph, and it's better named than left sitting there.
A photograph is one second of an appointment, and the second anybody bothers to photograph is never the dull one. So the pictures that travel are the loudest ones available, which makes them a poor guide to an ordinary Tuesday. Our microneedling page sets out the ordinary version, and that's the one to plan your evening around.
And how much you felt on the day tells you nothing about what you'll get, because your result isn't made in the room. Your own skin makes it over the months afterwards, which is why the photograph worth having is the one you take before you start, and why what microneedling actually does to your skin is the piece to read if you want the mechanism rather than the sensation.
Come and settle it on your own face
Arrange your consultation at our clinic on Broadway in Manchester and ask the three questions that need your actual face in the room: whereabouts on it we'd be working, how deep, and what that will feel like. The answer comes from the room rather than from a page, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided. If it's the first appointment rather than the treatment putting you off, what happens at an aesthetics consultation sets out how one runs. And if you're weighing up more than one treatment, we answer the same question about laser hair removal and about anti-wrinkle injections in the same plain way.
Needle is a truthful word and a poor description. What people actually sit through is a fine buzz moving across a face they can feel every inch of, followed by a few months of their own skin quietly getting on with the interesting part.