Botox 101 with Heather Avery, APRN, AP C | Weiler Plastic Surgery

One of our Expert Injectors, Heather Avery, APRN, AP C, educates us on all things Botox!

Hey, I’m Heather and I’m a nurse practitioner here at Weiler Plastic Surgery, and I get asked a lot of questions about Botox, so I’m gonna break it down for you today. All right, so Botox is a muscle relaxer, and so when you put Botox into a muscle, it’s going to slow down or stop the contraction of the muscle. I like to always give the analogy to my patients that if you can envision this as being a piece of paper that represents your skin and my hand representing a muscle, and when that muscle makes that contraction over and over and over throughout the years, you get a permanent, etched-in line. So when you place Botox in the muscle, it’s going to soften that line. Also, Botox causes the muscle to do the opposite of whatever it does, meaning if this muscle right here called the glabella pulls in and down to give you that frown line, when you place Botox in the muscle, it’s gonna lift it up. The three areas that are on label for Botox, the frown lines, the horizontal lines of the forehead, and the crow’s feet. Other areas that we can treat, the crepey skin underneath the eyes, those little bunny lines we get across the nose. When ladies smile and they have the gummy smile, we can actually lower the lip. The lines and wrinkles, those smokers lines, they call ’em, around the mouth. Or even patients that just want a general rollout of the lip and a little more fullness. So when you talk about units, honestly, it’s a sliding scale. Some people are going to require more than others. It’s going to depend on what your goals are, along with how strong your muscles are. Botox is dosed by the unit, so everyone’s units will be different. Botox is going to start kicking in about day five or seven, but it can take a full two to three weeks to see your optimal results. There’s so much I love about Botox. When patients come in, I just feel like they come back looking more refreshed and more youthful. It shaves off a few years. And who doesn’t wanna look younger, right?