BOTOX and Dysport are incredibly popular treatments for smoothing out crow’s feet, forehead lines, and the 11s (between the brows). With more than 4 million treatments performed in the U.S. in 2020, they’re the top-rated nonsurgical treatment year after year. Dysport and BOTOX are in demand at my Tifton, GA, med spa, too, but for more than just fighting wrinkles. Let’s look at how a few of these advanced uses can benefit you.
13 Tips: What else is Dysport & BOTOX good for?
1. Lifting the forehead
In a related blog post, I mentioned that relaxing the forehead muscle can lead to a dropped eyebrow. How then can there be a way to inject the forehead and actually lift the forehead? To understand this, you have to know about the recruitment phenomena. When a muscle loses strength for any reason, the nearby muscles try to compensate and work harder to make up for the muscle they lost. Well, they can’t really succeed because they aren’t “the” muscle that was lost, but they do end up working harder. If you pick just the right point toward the hairline to inject, the muscle above this area compensates by pulling harder. The trick is knowing just the right place to treat. When I do this injection, you will notice that I lift up at several points near the hairline to confirm just the right place to inject.
2. Shaping the eyebrow
We can relax the muscle around the eye to open that area. By picking the right spot, we can actually shape the eyebrow to energize and enhance that beautiful feminine arch.
3. Treating bunny lines
If you wrinkle your nose and see diagonal lines at the side of your nose, those are bunny lines. We can target that specific muscle to relax those lines. This is a frequent place where recruitment occurs (see No. 1 above) after treating the glabella. Often I will just anticipate this and treat the bunnies right at the start.
4. Reducing a gummy smile
Some patients show more upper gum than they like when they smile. Ideally, we aim to have the lip rest along the border of the gum and teeth when you’re smiling. If you show more gum, we can relax the muscle to keep you from lifting your upper lip too much.
5. Boosting skin texture under the eyes
The crepe-like skin texture under the eyes can be improved with Dysport. Here we aren’t targeting a muscle at all. Dysport has other properties which help skin texture. Some countries, notably Korea, use neuromodulators with a microdroplet technique just to improve skin texture and tone.
6. Widening the space between the eyelids
We can open up the space between the eyelids by relaxing the lower eyelid. This only works in younger patients in their 20s, 30s and perhaps 40s. As we age, we often get sagging of the eyelids, and Dysport would make this worse. You can tell by doing a snap test, which is performed by snapping down the lower eyelid and noticing how quickly it snaps back. If you are a suitable candidate, this can change your look and be very appealing.
7. Softening the vertical lip lines
People call these smoker’s lines, but you don’t have to be a smoker to have them. The muscle around the mouth is donut-shaped (just around the eye), and its direction of pull is inward, aggravating those lines. By relaxing that muscle, we try to stop the progression of the lines. Dysport alone won’t improve the lines, but it keeps them from getting worse. The lines can be improved with other techniques like fillers or energy-based treatments like lasers or radiofrequency (RF). Beware of overfilling the upper lip. As we age, our upper lip gets longer, thicker, and curls inwardly. Fillers can worsen that and so have to be used very carefully
8. Creating a lip flip
We hear a lot about lip flips these days. These procedures work with varying degrees of success and can be achieved with fillers or Dysport. Fillers tend to be more effective and last longer, but Dysport can be useful in the right patient. This is all about finding just the right spot in the upper lip and using the right amount of product
9. Turning a frown into a smile
Like many areas of the face, two or more muscles can work in opposite directions, and that’s true of smiles or frowns as well. When we relax, the frowning muscle (the DAO), the smile muscle dominates and can lift the corner of the mouth
10. Reshaping the masseter
Our faces go from roughly a triangle shape (the narrowest part is the lower face) to a more square or boxy shape as we age. Part of this is from the descent of the facial tissue with loss of volume in the fat pads, but in about 50% of women, the masseter (one of the chewing muscles) can get thick and strong, contributing to a square profile. We can inject this muscle with Dysport to relax it.
Some younger patients start out with a more square shape even from a very young age and want this changed. I love creating a completely different face shape just by relaxing the masseter. Below, you can see my favorite example of how relaxing a masseter can really create a new face. See more patient results in my gallery of before and after photos.
Don’t forget that this technique may help with jaw clenching, teeth grinding, and TMJ problems. I started out treating the masseter for cosmetic reasons, but now many patients come to me just to treat their jaw issues.
11. Tightening the jawline
A few years ago, Jean Carruthers, one of the pioneers in neuromodulator usage, published a technique for tightening the jawline. It seems counter-intuitive that relaxing a muscle can tighten an area. The platysma is a paper-thin muscle that runs as a very fine sheet of tissue between the clavicles and the jawline. Because the platysma can get overly strong over time, relaxing it can tighten a jaw by allowing the platysma to lay back down over the jaw bone.
12. Softening the vertical neck lines
Again, the platysma (see above) can get too tight, causing the formation of vertical bands in the neck. Selectively softening those bands can allow the rest of the platysma to pull and tighten the neck. This only works early on when the skin itself still retains some elasticity. If the skin is very saggy, tightening the platysma will have a limited effect. It takes an expert eye to know the right time to use this injection.
The most concerning complication of this approach is having unintended migration of the product into the muscles in the neck involved in swallowing. Data published in a number of studies help guide the right amount of product to use. However, the possibility of this complication definitely makes this an advanced technique.
13. Treating that orange peel skin on the chin
The medical name for this is “peau d’orange,” literally the skin of the orange. It occurs when the chin muscle is overactive and wrinkles the skin in a distinctive way. Relaxing the muscle allows the skin to resume its normal appearance. This is only seen in animation (movement), so you have to look in a mirror and make the right expression to see it.
The Next Step for Trying New Techniques
This is all a sample of ways that I approach the use of Dysport in my patients. I have developed these protocols from new ideas in medical studies, conferences, and most of all, by observing my patients. The advanced methods should only be performed by a well-trained provider. In fact, I think the use of Dysport itself is an advanced injection that requires the right kind of training.
If you are interested in Dysport or BOTOX and you’re in Cordele, Albany, or Valdosta, GA, or other communities near Tifton, call us at (229) 238-2007 or use our online form to request a free consultation. We will be happy to address your questions and goals comprehensively.
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