Botox can GIVE you wrinkles?!

By BrittB on 10 Nov 2010

I thought Botox was supposed to remove wrinkles, apparently not.

"According to a piece in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology cited in the Daily Mail, one of the least-known side effects of using lots of Botox is that it actually creates MORE wrinkles."

Comments (7)

anne88 7 Nov 2011

im now two months out from some dysport in the forehead. i loved the effect when it was very mild but it soon became way too strong and made my whole face totaly heavy which was awful. now at 2 months it is wearing off considerably and i hope it will all be gone soon. however as it wears off, i feel i have more wrinkles than i did, in very different places, and that they are less aesthetic than they were. (so far) this is very perplexing and i sure hope it 'goes back to normal' completely when its all worn off. the drs say it will 'go back to normal' but from what patients say (and what drs admit very infreqently) i am less sure. im trying to do stuff that makes me smile, and keeping a lot of vaseline on my face. not sure what else to do at this point. // noone EVER said anything about NEW wrinkles. //

smriti 12 Nov 2011

Hi Anne,

Infact i had very loose, wrinked skin when botox was wearing off (it was 5th & 6th mnth for me) i still have puffy eye and fine cracks got from botox but they reduced a lot.. Wrinkles disappeared a lot but not completely. It seems remaining botox is wearing off very slowly

anne88 12 Nov 2011

hey thanks for replying. :> could you give me any kind of a time frame that you saw for the process of wearing off, in other words, at what point did you start seeing noticeably more movement, and then what happened after that. it seems like its lasting a long time for you? i started getting a lot of movement at about 2 months. it seems to have gotten a lot better over the last 2 weeks, and im really hoping this means that most of it will be gone by 3 months and all of it by 4. it seems to happen this way for some people so im keeping my fingers crossed. thanks for any perspective & good luck.

smriti 7 Nov 2011

Yes!!
I had a fine line under right eye, its 61/2 months completed after having botox, i can see looseness any many fine diagonal lines.. and one more wrinkle parallel to old fine line

Hassan Galadari, MD 10 Nov 2010

Further reading of the article explains how these wrinkles develop. When muscles that are injected becomes relaxed, a person who is new to Botox starts using other muscles for expressions he's used to make. This recruitment of other muscles causes more wrinkles. The most common area that gets affected by this is the bunny lines on the nose when the crow's feet are injected. Its easily remedied with a tad bit of material in the newly recruited muscle.

View answers from Hassan Galadari, MD

BrittB 10 Nov 2010

Thanks Dr Galadari,

Does that mean every time you get Botox new wrinkles will appear as you start using new muscles?

-Britt

anne88 7 Nov 2011

to be honest this makes me a little upset. // you'd think that sales of this stuff would drop significantly if people knew this information more widely. you make it sound really simple like, well just get more product! oh great, so i have to keep spending $1500 a year to keep fixing damage i got from spending $400?? that sounds like something a drug dealer would say. // i appreciate this stuff works fine for lots of people but it can't just be acceptable to say "well you might get a bunch of new wrinkles that look worse than the old ones, but i sure wont tell you that anywhere before you do it, but hey, give me some more money and i'll fix you up. and also, give you more wrinkles so you'll be stuck doing it again. yay for me!" that just sounds awful. will these effects go away completely on their own, or will they not? // if they will not, that needs to be made clearly known before people do this procedure. this was -never- listed in anything i read or saw about potential side effects. not cool.