Hello, my name's Adrian Richards and I'm a Plastic and Cosmetic Surgeon and I'm the Medical Director of Aurora Clinics. Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about Botox as part of our series of videos on Botox. I'm going to be discussing how long Botox should last and how long between treatments.

So Botox as I mentioned before is a substance which is injected near the muscles selectively weakens overactive muscles. With muscle activity in the first few days you may notice a slightly odd feeling in the muscles, like you're aware something is going on. It's not uncomfortable but you know something is going on, and this partiuclalry happens on the first treatment. On subsequent treatments you don't notice it quite as much. So you should notice a decrease in muscle activity really within five our six days, sometimes earlier, but by a week you certainly should have noticed something, and by two weeks you wont get any more activity, so the Botox will have fully worked by two weeks and that's why this is often the time that, if we do need to see you again we'd like to see you to slightly adjust treatment until we get the perfect recipe for you. So what we tend to do is give you treatment, and we're always learning what the different recipe for you is because everyone's different, everyone acquires slightly different treatments and we get to know that with time.

So how long will it work after that? Well we normally say three months. So by three months it's likely that the activity may be beginning to wear off, or if it hasn't started to wear off it will do soon. So what we like you to do is rather than wait for the Botox to completely wear off and all the frown marks to come and start folding the skin we like to repeat the treatment, certainly within the year, before muscle activity has come back. So what we like to encourage you to do is have four treatments within the first year. If we can do four treatments within the first year, separated at three monthly intervals, even the deepest wrinkles will go. So they wont go if you have treatment and then three months later you're holiday and it's difficult to get a treatment and you start folding the lines again, you're back to square one. So we like four treatments within the first year. And then we can basically get the over-active muscles decreased in activity and create a balanced look and even the deepest wrinkles will go.

Interestingly, if you can have four treatments in the first year often you need much less treatment subsequently because the muscle's been weakened and actually your nerve impulses have changed slightly so the nerves tend not to innovate the same muscles, so most patients who have had Botox for a year need less Botox in the future and slightly less often. So often the treatment, you might go to four months, six months, so often patients have much longer between treatments if you can get that first year under your belt.

So again, just to emphasise, upper face Botox is a very safe treatment, there's a lot of sort of misconceptions about it in the press that it's going to make you more wrinkly, that you're going to be frozen. These really aren't true if done by experienced and responsible practitioners, but it is important to consider that it's not just a one-off treatment, it should be part of a programme of treatments really to get the best results.

So thank you for watching the video. If you've got any questions regarding treatment or any of the other treatments offered by Aurora Clinics please don't hesitate to contact me either by phone at my office on 01844 214 362 or via email via the website.