Some people try BOTOX® Cosmetic and don’t like it.
Don’t get me wrong — I love BOTOX® Cosmetic and it works great for me. And I have a few clients who would sacrifice every other spa treatment, if necessary, in order to have their botox.
But sometimes BOTOX® Cosmetic just isn’t the right thing for a particular person. I had a client in recently, a woman in her early 40s, I’ll call her Mary for the sake of this article.
Mary has pretty long crow’s feet radiating out from her eyes, frown lines between her brows and horizontal lines on her forehead. We did a treatment with BOTOX® Cosmetic and got good results but she felt that it altered her facial expressions and she didn’t like that.
These aren’t Mary’s pictures but they give you an idea of what Mary’s lines looked like and how well they responded to BOTOX® Cosmetic.
So what else can we do to minimize these lines?
What’s causing the lines is two-fold: a loss of resiliency of the skin and shrinkage of the framework of the face (bones, muscles, etc.) so the overlying skin is a little oversized.
We can improve the resiliency of the skin using treatments like fractionated laser, peels, radiofrequency treatments and skincare products. All of these will stimulate collagen formation in the skin. However, the results would be modest and take several treatments and many months to build up.
We can put fillers in place that would give the appearance of building up the framework of the face. The results are immediate and natural. I’ve shown an example previously here. However, fillers do not improve the resiliency of the skin so we would probably still have to do a Pixel, Accent or peel.
Instead, we chose a single treatment that addresses both problems: Sculptra.
Sculptra stimulates your body to make collagen. We can inject it at the skin level to make the skin firmer and more resilient and we can inject it deep at the muscle level and near the bone. The resulting collagen formation thickens those tissues, building up the framework of the face.
It’ll take 8 weeks or more for the body to make enough collagen that you’ll see the results so it’s definitely not the treatment for instant gratification but the results are so natural-looking and long-lasting that they’re worth waiting for.
Another option is to do some filler now for instant gratification and starting the Sculptra so that you’ve built up the collagen by the time the filler has worn off.
We went the pure Sculptra route with Mary and I just injected her recently so I don’t have any results to show you yet. I’ll see if I can talk her into sharing her before and after pictures with you in a few weeks.