Of everything we do in this building, the jaw is the slowest to turn up in a before and after photograph, and it's the one people most want to see photographed. Those two facts sit very awkwardly together, and untangling them is the whole job of this article.
Why a masseter Botox before and after is nearly always taken too early
Masseter Botox® is an anti-wrinkle injection placed into the muscle you clench with, the firm ridge that pops out at the corner of your jaw when you bite down. How it takes the power out of a clench is a piece of its own. What matters on this page is that it hands you two quite separate changes, and the two of them arrive on completely different timetables.
The first is the easing of the clenching and the morning ache, and that builds over about ten days, as the muscle properly relaxes. The second is the slimming, if slimming is what you came for, and it comes on far more slowly, because a muscle that stops being worked gets smaller a little at a time rather than all at once.
Now hold an ordinary before and after up against those two timetables. Somebody has their treatment, waits out the ten days, gives it a few days more for luck, takes the second photograph and sets the pair side by side. For very nearly everything else on our list that would be a perfectly fair test: a forehead line sits on the surface, it's finished inside those same ten days, and a fortnight is long enough to have caught the lot.
A jaw is a different matter altogether, because what you're hunting for in that second picture is the outline of your own face. That outline moves slowly and in small amounts, so the fortnight that does justice to every other treatment does none at all to this one. The photograph shows a face that already feels completely different and still looks very much the same, which is a strange trick for a camera to play on a treatment that is working exactly as it should.
So there's the first thing to ask of any masseter Botox before and after you're ever shown, and it has nothing to do with the face in it. How long between the two? If nobody says, the pair isn't telling you anything, because the gap between them is the part doing all the work.
Why you'll be the last person to notice your own jaw
Here's the bit that catches people out even worse than the photographs do, and it's worth having before you start checking rather than afterwards.
Think about how a child grows. Live in the same house and you'd swear they hadn't gained an inch since Easter, because you see them at breakfast every single morning and the change never turns up in a piece big enough to notice. Then an aunt turns up at Christmas, hasn't seen them since the summer, and says it out loud before she's got her coat off. The child did precisely the same growing in both halves of that story. One person was looking every day; the other was comparing two moments with half a year in between.
Your face is the child, and you are the one at the breakfast table. You'll be looking at your jaw more often than anybody else alive, in a bathroom you know by heart, which makes you the person least likely to catch it changing. There's nothing wrong with your eyes; that's simply what daily looking does to any gradual change, and it's exactly why anyone who has ever put pencil marks on a kitchen wall has already solved this. You don't watch. You mark, and then you compare the marks.
So take the marks. One photograph now, before anything at all happens, is worth more to you than any amount of squinting at yourself, and it takes no time worth mentioning.
The angle trap, and why jaw width only reads front-on
There's a catch in the marks, mind you, and it ruins more masseter photographs than anything else does.
Stand square in front of a picture hanging on a wall and you can see exactly how wide the frame is. Now walk off to one side, keeping your eyes on it, and watch that same frame narrow and narrow until it's very nearly a line on the wall. Nothing whatsoever has happened to the picture. You've simply left the one position that could tell you how wide it was.
Every width in the world behaves that way, and the width of a jaw is measured across two corners sitting at the sides of your face, so square to the lens is the only view that shows both of them at their true distance apart. Turn your head a little and the near corner comes forward and reads bigger, while the far one tucks itself in behind your cheek. The very thing you were trying to judge is the thing that turn hides.
And the three-quarter turn is what nearly everybody's camera roll is made of. It's the angle we all drift into without ever deciding to, chin down a fraction, one side nearer the lens, because it's the one that flatters. Which means a "before" taken at a slight angle beside an "after" taken square on isn't a picture of a muscle changing at all. It's a picture of somebody turning their head.
So if you're going to take your own pair, keep everything the same and let only the calendar move. Stand in the same spot at the same hour, in the same light, with your hair off your face and the lens square to you rather than off to one side. And then one more that belongs to this treatment alone: keep your jaw relaxed, teeth apart, mouth closed. Clench for the camera and you've photographed the muscle at its very biggest, which is the one measurement you didn't want.
What changes first is the thing a camera can't photograph at all
There's a lovely symmetry in this treatment, and it's worth a moment of your time.
The change that matters most day to day is the one that arrives first, and no camera has ever caught it. You get up one morning and your jaw has nothing to say about it. That's the ache lifting, and it's the ground the whole treatment stands on, which is why it has a piece to itself about the muscle that works all night rather than a paragraph here.
The change you came looking for arrives last, and it's the only one a photograph can show you. So the two halves sit at opposite ends of the clock and at opposite ends of what a camera can hold. Judge this by pictures alone and you'll be judging it by the slower half, quietly missing the half you actually feel.
Why the same treatment softens one jaw and leaves another exactly as it was
If masseter Botox gone wrong is a phrase you've typed into a search bar, what you're really asking is how two people can have the same treatment and end up so differently pleased with it, and the honest answer is a good deal less dramatic than the phrase makes it sound. Two judgements decide it, and both belong to the consultation rather than to the syringe.
The first is whose face it is. A jaw that's wide because years of clenching have built the muscle up will soften once that muscle is allowed to stand down. A jaw that's wide because of the bone underneath won't, since no injection changes bone, and a masseter that was an ordinary size to begin with hasn't a great deal to give back either. In those last two the injections would still ease the clenching, and your face would keep its shape, which is a thing to hear before you book rather than after.
The second judgement is how much and where, and that's a fact about your particular muscle instead of a number off a shelf, which is the same principle we've written up in why the amount is judged on your face. Do say plainly what you want from it, too. Plenty of people want the clenching gone and their jawline left exactly as it is, which is a perfectly good thing to ask for and changes the plan we agree with you.
Which is also why we recommend an appointment afterwards to look at the result together, and with a change this gradual it earns its place more than almost anywhere else on the face. That appointment is really the second photograph in the pair: taken by somebody who saw the first one, who can feel the muscle again while you clench, and who can tell you what has genuinely moved rather than what you think you can see at seven in the morning.
The only before and after that can answer your question
All of which leads somewhere slightly awkward. The only pair of pictures that can tell you what your jaw would do is a pair of photographs of your own jaw, and the second of those doesn't exist yet. The first one is available this afternoon.
That's what a consultation is for, and here it's a quick and rather satisfying check: we feel the muscle at the corner of your jaw while you clench, and the size of it answers the question. You'll hear plainly whether years of clenching have built it up or whether it was always an ordinary size, what the injections would change about the shape of your face, and just as plainly what they wouldn't.
The same look settles the other thing people arrive muddled about, which is worth knowing before you come. Wide and undefined are two separate complaints. A jaw that's wide and that you'd like narrower is a question about muscle, and that's this treatment. A jaw whose border has gone soft and that you'd like sharper is a question about structure, and jawline and chin filler is the piece to read instead.
Arrange a consultation and bring the jaw with you. Every treatment at Broadway Retreat is delivered by experienced medical professionals at our CQC-registered clinic on Broadway in Manchester, and nothing goes ahead until you've decided.
Then take your own "before" today: square to a window, teeth apart, hair back. And then put the phone away and genuinely forget about it, because the forgetting is what makes the second photograph worth taking.