How To Make Botox Last Longer

How To Make Botox Last Longer? Can you extend the life of Botox? How to get the best result from Botox?

How To Make Botox Last Longer

This is not medical advice. Always talk with your own healthcare provider and medical provider for any cosmetic treatment and medical treatments.

If you’ve been wondering how to make your Botox last longer, then this article is for you.

The best way to have Botox last a long time:

1) Get enough Botox units

2) Follow your Botox aftercare instructions.

These are the two critical pieces.

Let’s talk about number of Botox units. We can tell you that one of the most important things about the effects of Botox lasting the longest that it can is that dose equals duration.

Dose = Duration

Botox Last How Long

There is simply a certain amount of Botox units that it takes to treat a muscle group and to have that muscle group be treated for a length of time.

So for example, let’s talk about 11 lines. So we refer to this muscle group as your glabella complex, and it’s made up of five muscles.

There’s one in the middle called the procerus. There is a corrugator supercilii and a depressor supercilii that’s kind of right underneath that.

Those muscles act together to pull the eyebrows down and in. They’re pretty strong.

In some people, they’re even stronger than in others. That muscle group has a certain amount of strength to it. Then, you’ll have your individual differences that will make that muscle group maybe even a little bit stronger.

Typically, on-label dosing, Botox units is 20 units for that area.

If you treat that area with 12 units or 14 units, will you get a result? Yes, you will.

Will that result last three or three and a half months with your Botox treatment? Probably not because it’s not enough units to give you that longevity and that duration.

Botox Results

With any Botox injection results, we want your treatment and your investment to last as long as possible. Typically there’s just a certain number of units we’re going to recommend in order to get that treatment to last as long as possible.

Underdosing your Botox treatment is not a strategy to make your treatment last as long as possible.

Using proper dosing is a strategy to have that treatment last as long as possible with . Talk to your providers about proper dosing and regular maintenance treatments.

Understand that there is a recommended dose per area that’s going to get you your results and get them to last a long enough time that you’re going to be really satisfied with your individual results.

Typically with Botox, it’s going to last from 12 to 14 weeks.

Dysport Or Botox Which Lasts Longer

• Dysport it is 14 to 16 weeks.
• DAXXIFY is a little bit more complicated. Usually four to five months is what we see in clinical practice.
• Xeomin about three months.
• Jeuveau is about three to four months depending on the dosing that you’re using there. That’s typical as long as you’re using on-label dosing.

As long as you’re providing enough units, you will shorten the duration with your Botox if you don’t use enough units. Talk to your provider, have them map, have them talk to you about the number of units they recommend.

If it’s in your budget to do two complete treatments a year and do on-label dosing or what your provider is recommending, that would be more to your benefit than skimping by with less amounts. Trying to get every two to three months with fewer units over time, that is not a great strategy.

Use enough units to get the treatment that you deserve for your overall Botox treatment and effectiveness of Botox.

Can You Extend The Life Of Botox?

The other thing is that it’s really mission critical to follow your aftercare and care of your skin. When patients leave our practice, we will often give them just a list of aftercare instructions. Botox aftercare instructions include:

• Stay upright for a little bit of time, mostly so that Botox doesn’t move around to any other muscle groups.
• Ask my patients not to rub any of the areas that we’ve treated because we’ve carefully mapped where that Botox treatment area was placed.  We don’t want it to move from exactly where it was precision injected to any of the other muscle groups or spread beyond where we intended for that Botox injection site to spread.
• Give my patients instructions for exercise. So exercise, being in a sauna hot tub, a really hot environment, those sorts of things to not do after Botox treatment.

Your Botox provider may have said those to you in the past. Here is the thing, if you do things that increase your circulation, so things like strenuous exercise, maybe going and sitting in a sauna or a hot tub or going out from your Botox treatment and maybe sitting on the pool side in summertime with your kids and family, those are not a good idea.

Botox Duration

When we inject Botox, it’s going to take a certain amount of time for the nerve cell where the Botox does its job to take that Botox up inside the cell where it actually is going to work for a period of time.  That Botox is going to hang around the outside of that nerve cell before it’s invited in while it’s in that process of hanging out outside of the nerve cell.

If you increase your circulation, there is a chance that you could by the blood flow that’s happening on the outside of the nerve cell wash, that active Botox right out of the place where you want it to do its action in the treated areas.

If you do something that’s going to raise your blood pressure and increase your circulation, whether or not that’s being near a poolside when you’re outside in the heat, hot yoga, excessive sun exposure, you’re going to vasodilate a little bit, you’re going to increase your blood circulation, you could wash that Botox out before it has a chance to do its full effect. You can do that if you’re sitting in a sauna hot tub. If you’re exercising and doing something kind of high intensity that’s going to raise your blood pressure, that circulation increases.

You might have faster wash. If you wash that Botox out of that space before it has a chance to get into the nerve cell and do its job, then you are just going to reduce the efficacy of your treatment and probably reduce the duration of action of your treatment.

Botox Last Longer

Those are the two critical things:

1) Get enough units with regular Botox injections

2) Make sure that you are not doing things that are going to increase your circulation, which would change results of Botox.

Follow those post-care instructions that is going to help you have longer-lasting results and most prolonged action of your Botox results.

How Much Zinc To Make Botox Last Longer

There is some thought out there that a zinc supplement is definitely something that can help prolong the action of your Botox treatment. And back in 2012 or 2013, there was a study that came forward looking at dietary zinc supplementation.  The amount of zinc supplementation was 50 milligrams. In this study, there was evidence that it increased the Botox treatment duration of action. That was back in 2012 or 2013.

There have been other analyses since then. One most recently in 2023 that actually looked more carefully at the study methodology and retrospectively went back.

It’s called a meta-analysis where someone, their study is actually looking at previous research and analyzing that previous research.  This 2023 meta-analysis looked at the study methodology and also the strength of the conclusions drawn by the previous studies.

And the evidence is actually pretty equivocal in terms of will zinc actually prolong the effectiveness of your treatments. The answer is, we don’t know really truly because the evidence that we have from our scientific literature is not the strongest evidence.

Will zinc supplementation help prolong your treatment? The answer by scientific papers, we don’t know.  Will it harm you? Chances are very low that any zinc supplementation would cause any harm if that’s something you and your provider discuss and that’s something you want to try.

We don’t think there’s harm in that, but we don’t necessarily think that there’s good scientific evidence that really supports the use of zinc actually seeing a causal effect in prolonging the duration of action of your treatment.

We never really recommend it to patients.

A great way to extend is to get the proper unit dosing for your treatment and then also follow your aftercare instructions for best results of your treatment.

And with upcoming warming days ahead, make sure to protect your skin from sun damage by wearing sunscreen. We recommend medical-grade skincare products that we can talk about at a skin consultation to help with overall skin health and healthy skin. Of course, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with sunscreen will with effective protection on your face from the aging process.