You have almost certainly asked this question somewhere and been handed a tidy number by somebody who had never seen your face. Here's what that number is really made of, because once you can see the parts, you'll know exactly why yours has to be measured rather than quoted.
Why nobody can tell you how long your Botox will last
Start with snow, because it settles this faster than anything else we could say to you.
The same fall arrives over the whole town on the same night. By lunchtime the main road is black and wet, and the lane behind the church is still white and will stay white for days. Nobody standing in either place would say the snow had behaved differently. The ground was different and the traffic over it was different, and the snow simply did what snow does on each.
So ask how long snow lasts and there is no answer to give you. Ask how long it lasts on your street and there's a very good one, and everybody who lives on it already knows.
That's the whole of this article, and the rest is just the working.
Anti-wrinkle injections, the ones nearly everyone calls Botox®, do one thing wherever they are placed: they quieten the message travelling from nerve to muscle, so the muscle eases off and stops creasing the skin above it. That quiet was never designed to be permanent. The muscle steadily wins its strength back, its old habit returns along with it, and the result fades as that happens.
How long that takes is not a fact about the syringe. It's a fact about the meeting between what was placed and the muscle it was placed into, and the muscle belongs to you. Which is why a figure quoted before anybody has looked at your face is a guess, however kindly it was meant, and we'd say precisely the same about a figure quoted here. There's nothing wrong with knowing the general shape of a thing. What can't honestly be done is turning a general shape into your number over the phone.
The four things that decide how long your result holds
Four things do most of the deciding, and every one of them comes with a plain reason attached.
The first is how much was placed. If the injection quietens a message and the muscle then sets about winning its strength back, more placed means more to be undone before it's pulling at full force again, and less placed means less. That is the honest cost of asking for a deliberately light hand, and baby Botox is where we've written that trade out properly.
The second is how strong that particular muscle is, and it's the half of the sum almost everybody forgets. An amount is only one side of a meeting; the muscle it meets is the other. A frown muscle that has been in hard practice for decades is a far bigger thing to quieten than one that has never been asked for much, so the same amount lands differently in those two faces and leaves at a different pace. The muscles across your own face aren't all the same size or the same strength either, which is why two areas on one face can behave quite differently from each other.
The third is how much you use your face, and this is the traffic on the road. Some faces are quiet nearly all day. Others are at work from the first coffee onwards: teaching, presenting, selling, listening hard across a table, doing half the talking before a word has come out. A muscle in constant use is a muscle in constant training, and a muscle in training finds its old strength more readily than one that mostly sits still. Busy roads clear sooner. That isn't a fault to be fixed, mind you, and nobody should be using their face less on account of it. It's simply a fact worth planning around.
The fourth is whether this is your first time or your fifth, and it cuts in two directions at once. If it's your first, yours is the one face nobody has yet watched do this, however many faces they have treated, so your first result is the first real evidence anybody has. And if you've had it before, the muscle you're bringing in is not the muscle you brought last time. It has spent a stretch not pulling as hard as it used to, and a muscle that isn't being worked doesn't hold its condition the way a worked one does. So a repeat often behaves differently from a first go, and which way yours goes is one of the things we're genuinely watching for.
The afternoon itself, before the waiting starts
Before any of that, though, there's an afternoon to get through, and it's a good deal less eventful than people picture.
The consultation comes first, always. That's where we check the treatment suits you, watch how your face actually moves, and agree exactly which areas we're treating. Then the treatment itself, which is quick and thoroughly ordinary to sit through: the injections go into the muscles we agreed on, no anaesthetic is needed, and any discomfort is brief and minimal.
You leave with specific aftercare instructions for the first hours and the first days, and there is very little here to recover from. Then your afternoon carries on exactly the way it was going to, and so does the rest of your week.
As for what those instructions ask of you and the reasoning behind every line of them, we've written Botox aftercare as its own page, so this one can get on with the question of time.
What the ten days actually feel like
Here's the part that catches nearly everybody out, and it's why we say ten days out loud before you've even booked. The full effect develops over about ten days, and almost none of it announces itself at the start. We've given that wait a whole article of its own, with the day numbers and the mechanism behind them; what belongs here is how it feels from the inside.
Nothing happens on the way home. Nothing happens that evening either, and if you go and look in the bathroom mirror before bed you will find exactly the face you walked in with, which is unnerving the first time and completely normal.
The first change most people notice isn't in the mirror at all. It's in the moving. You go to frown at something and the frown arrives with less behind it than you were expecting, or you raise your brows at a message and there's a faint sense of the shrug having gone out of it. That's the message quietening, and it is happening in the muscle rather than on the skin, which is exactly why the mirror has nothing to report yet.
Then the skin catches up, and there's a genuinely good reason it comes second. The line was pressed in by movement, so the movement has to stop before the skin gets any relief from it. Take the folding away and the crease it kept doesn't vanish that same afternoon; it eases, slowly, once nothing is folding it any more. Movement first, then the line. That's the order, and it's the order every time.
By the end of the ten days the treated muscles have eased as far as they are going to ease, the skin above them has stopped being creased, and what you're looking at is your result. Look then. Don't go hunting in between, because a change arriving that gradually is exactly the sort your own eyes quietly stop registering while it happens.
There's a small mercy hidden in that pace, too. Nobody around you gets a before and an after. They get a Tuesday that looks slightly better than Monday did, ten times over, which is why the people who see you daily tend to notice nothing whatsoever, and the one who's been away comes back and tells you that you look well.
The stretch where nothing happens, and why it's the part you came for
Then comes the phase nobody ever writes about, for the obvious reason that there's nothing to report from it.
Your result sits where it landed. The treated muscles stay eased, the skin above them stays uncreased, and the honest description of the whole stretch is that you stop thinking about it. The mirror goes back to being something you use rather than something you check. You get ready in the morning without the small pause you had quietly built into it. Photographs stop being an event.
That's what you actually bought, by the way. Not the appointment, which is over almost before it has begun, and not the ten days, which are mostly waiting. You bought the stretch afterwards where your forehead simply isn't on your mind, and how long that stretch runs is the very thing this whole article says nobody can hand you in advance.
How Botox wears off, and why you get plenty of warning
It leaves the way it arrived, which is to say gradually, and in the same order.
The muscle goes back into training. It steadily wins its strength back, its old habit returns along with it, and once it's pulling properly again there is something creasing the skin once more. Nothing is switched off at any point, so there is no morning when you wake to find the whole thing gone overnight. What happens instead is that the movement comes back first, exactly as the movement went first, and one day you catch your frown arriving with a bit more behind it than it had been.
That order is worth knowing, because it hands you notice. You see it coming while your result is still perfectly good, so nothing is ever forced and nobody is ever hurrying you. You decide, in your own time, whether you'd like another go.
And that's the honest headline about this treatment. It isn't permanent, and it was never meant to be. A muscle regaining its own strength is not the treatment failing; it's the treatment being the temporary thing it has always been. That's the reassuring half of it as well, because nothing here is a commitment. If you tried it and decided it wasn't for you, there would be nothing to undo. You'd only have to wait.
Why your review appointment is where your number actually comes from
We recommend a post-treatment appointment so we can look at your result together, and on this particular question it's the appointment that does the real work.
Here's what's being gathered there. Somebody who watched your face move before anything was placed, and who chose the areas and the amounts with that in mind, now gets to see what your face did with it by the end of your ten days. What was expected, set beside what actually turned up: that comparison is the first real fact anybody has ever had about your face and this treatment, and it is worth more than any figure on any website, this one included, because it belongs to you.
The second fact arrives later, and it comes from you rather than from us. The day you catch your frown arriving with its old force again is the most useful thing you will ever tell us, so make a note of it. The stretch between the end of your ten days and that day is your answer, measured on your own face rather than borrowed from strangers.
And once you have it, you keep it. It shapes what we would place next time and where, whether the plan wants adjusting at all, and when you'd sensibly come back. That's something true about yourself that no clinic could have told you and no article could have guessed, and you only had to live through one round to own it.
There's one question we'd want you asking wherever you went, and it matters far more than any figure you will ever be quoted: who is actually going to treat me, and what are they qualified to do? Both the safety and the quality of what you get from an anti-wrinkle injection sit with the person holding the syringe. Every injectable at Broadway Retreat is given by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and the consultation comes before anything else.
Come and find out what your own face does with it
If you arrived here wanting a number and you're leaving with a method instead, that's much the better trade, and here is where you start collecting yours.
Arrange a consultation and we'll watch how your face actually moves, tell you which muscles are doing the work and what we would place where, and give you an honest view of what to expect from your particular face rather than a figure lifted off somebody else's. Then your own ten days confirm it, and the review appointment is where it gets settled. The anti-wrinkle injections page has the fuller picture if you'd like to read that first.
If it turns out these injections aren't the right answer for the thing that's bothering you, you'll hear that just as plainly, along with what would be. And if what's holding you back is simply not knowing how the visit itself goes, what actually happens at a consultation walks you through it.
You find out how long the snow lasts on your street by living there through one winter. There has never been another way to know.