You've had the appointment, you've been back to the mirror more times than you'd admit to anybody, and your face is doing precisely what it did on the way in. Nothing has gone wrong; you've simply arrived at the part of this treatment that nobody thinks to describe in advance, so here it is in full.
Day one is meant to look like nothing at all
Let's deal with the first evening straight away, because it's the one that unsettles people most.
You will get home and look. Of course you will. You've spent money on your own face and the only tool you've been given for checking on it is a mirror, so you use the mirror, and what you find there is the face you walked in with. Then you find it again before bed, and again in the morning, and by then a quiet little thought has started up about whether it has worked at all.
That thought is completely ordinary and it is also wrong, and the reason is worth having properly, because it makes the rest of the waiting easy.
Why anti-wrinkle injections can't work straight away
The honest answer is that the work starts immediately, and none of it starts anywhere you can see.
Here's what's actually going on. Your muscles don't decide anything by themselves. Every time you frown, a nerve ending sends the muscle a chemical message telling it to pull, and the muscle pulls because it was told to. Anti-wrinkle injections, the treatment nearly everybody calls Botox®, don't act on the muscle at all. They act on the sending end. The product has to be taken up into those nerve endings first, and once it's inside, it puts the machinery that releases the message out of use. Fewer messages go out, the muscle pulls less hard, and the skin above it stops being folded so sharply.
Every step of that is a biological process rather than a switch being thrown, and none of it can be hurried. There's no single moment when it's done either, because a muscle has a great many of these endings and they aren't all dealt with at once. The quiet builds. It doesn't arrive.
Anyone who has lived in a house with underfloor heating knows this feeling exactly. You press the thermostat, it clicks under your thumb straight away, and the room stays cold. What's happening is that the warmth goes into the floor first, the floor takes hours to come up, and only then does the room begin to feel like anything. Later still, the blanket that lives on the back of the sofa stays folded all evening, and you never once decided that.
Anti-wrinkle injections run that same order. The click is the appointment, over in minutes and giving you nothing to feel. The floor is the nerve endings, tucked out of sight and doing every bit of the work while there is nothing to see. The room is the muscle, which changes only once that hidden work is finished. And the mirror is the folded blanket: the last thing to register, and never the place anything was happening.
The picture does break in one place, and it's worth saying where. Warmth really does travel out of a floor and into a room. The injection travels nowhere. It stays in the nerve endings that took it up and does its work there, and what moves along the chain instead is the consequence: a message not sent, so a muscle not pulled, so a crease not pressed.
So the mirror is the last link in the chain and the first place everybody looks. That's the whole of the confusion, and it's why the first few days feel so much longer than they are.
The timetable, as it usually runs
Nobody can hand you a schedule for your own face, but the general shape is steady enough to plan around, and knowing it in advance is the cure for the fidgeting.
The first day or two. Nothing to find, and going looking is the surest way to talk yourself into gloom about something that hasn't happened yet. The rest of your day goes ahead exactly as planned. You leave with specific aftercare for the first hours and days, and following it is the only job you have; Botox aftercare goes through the reasoning behind each instruction if you'd like it written down.
Around days two to five. This is the usual window for the first sign of anything, and the chain decides in advance what that sign will be. The muscle sits between the nerve endings and your skin, so the muscle is always the earlier of the two to change, which means the first evidence is something you feel rather than something you see. The mirror runs several days behind it, and no face gets to run that order the other way round.
Through the rest of the ten days. The full effect develops over about ten days. Across them the treated muscles ease as far as they are going to, and the skin above them follows behind, because a crease is kept sharp by the folding that made it and can only begin to soften once that folding eases. So the line is always last on the list, and that is most of what the ten days are for.
At the end of them. There's a finished thing in the mirror by now, and it has earned a proper look.
Why a verdict in week one is a verdict on the wrong face
Now for the part that saves a great deal of unnecessary worrying.
The face you see midway through isn't a weaker version of your finished result. It's a different thing altogether, because it's a face where some of the work has landed and some of it hasn't yet.
Think of the streetlights coming up along a road at dusk. Dusk reaches every one of them at the same moment, and they still don't arrive together, because each lamp comes up at its own rate. One is at full strength while the next is barely orange, a whole stretch sits somewhere in between, and if you looked out of the window at exactly the wrong minute you'd call the street patchy — right about the minute, wrong about the evening. Give it ten more and the road is lit end to end.
Treated areas take their cue together in the same way, and then get on with it at their own pace. So partway through, one area can read as further along than another, and a face can look a little uneven to the person who owns it. That's the arriving, not the result. What settles it is the rest of the ten days, and anything still on your mind at the end of them is exactly what your review appointment is for.
And if something is worrying you before then, ring us rather than sitting with it. The phone number is at the bottom of every page on this site for precisely that sort of call.
What a room can tell you that a mirror can't
We recommend a post-treatment appointment once the ten days are done, and this is the question it answers best.
A mirror hands you one still moment and calls it your face. A room hands you the whole of it. In front of us you can frown, lift your brows, smile at something, and what gets judged is the moving face rather than a single frame cut out of it. We also know which areas were treated and what was placed in them, so we can hold the result up against the plan that produced it. Until then, everything anybody could tell you was a general truth about faces. After it, something is known about yours.
It's also where you say the useful things out loud: that you'd like a touch more somewhere next time, or that you'd rather keep more movement in one area. Those are ordinary things to ask for, and saying them is how they get planned in.
This is only half the timetable, by the way. How many months your result then holds is a separate question with a separate answer, and we've written that one out properly in how long Botox lasts.
Weigh any clinic — ours included — on one thing above the rest. Anti-wrinkle injections have been performed for over twenty years, and both the safety and the quality of what you get from them sit with the person holding the syringe, so ask who that will be and what they're qualified to do. At Broadway Retreat every injectable is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and a consultation always comes first.
Come and start your own ten days
If you haven't booked yet and the waiting is the bit putting you off, that's a very reasonable thing to have been sitting with, and it's much easier to get through once you know what's happening underneath it.
Arrange a complimentary consultation and we'll have your face do its own talking — frown, lift, smile — while we work out which muscles are making the line that bothers you, and tell you plainly what the injections would and wouldn't change. The appointment itself typically takes around fifteen minutes, no anaesthetic is needed, and any discomfort is brief and minimal. If something else would serve you better, you'll hear that just as plainly. And if it's the visit itself rather than the treatment giving you pause, what actually happens at a consultation walks you through the door.
Then you go home, look in the mirror that evening, and find absolutely nothing. Now you'll know that's the floor warming up.