Beyond Wrinkles: 5 Surprising Uses for Botox® You Didn't Know About

From the moment Botox® burst onto the scene more than two decades ago, it has been a juggernaut in the cosmetic world thanks to its impressive ability to smooth out wrinkles with just a few injections. Today, nearly 10 million Botox® and neurotoxin treatments are administered each year in the United States.

If you think that these treatments are all for minimizing wrinkles around your eyes and forehead, think again. Over the years, we’ve found some other great aesthetic uses for Botox.

To give you an idea of some of the great things that Botox can do beyond smoothing out wrinkles, we turn to the experienced team at Orange Coast Dermatology. Although Botox certainly is a workhorse in the wrinkle arena, check out these other impressive uses for Botox.

1. Platysma bands and neck contouring

Botox was recently approved by the FDA for relaxing platysma bands in your neck — those two cords of muscle on either side of your neck that can become more prominent as you age.

With Botox, we can relax these bands to improve the contour of your jaw and neck and restore your great profile.

As a side benefit to relaxing your platysma bands with Botox, once the hold of these bands is released, skin around your jawline won’t have as much downward tension. This effect allows muscles in your face to pull your skin upward for a tighter jawline.

2. Lip flip

Lip fillers are great for plumping up thin lips, but some people don’t like the “done” look afterward. If you’d like a little more of your lip to show, and you want the results to look natural, we can use Botox to perform a more subtle lip flip.

To perform a lip flip, we inject Botox around the edges of your lips and in the corner of your mouth. This allows your lip to flip upward, giving you the appearance of larger lips, without doing the bulking work.

3. Severe sweating

Roughly 3% of US adults have hyperhidrosis, a condition that causes severe sweating, especially under the armpits, in the palms of your hands, and in the soles of your feet.

Botox is a great tool for remedying excessive sweating in these areas, allowing you to shake hands and raise your arms with confidence.

4. Brow lift

Another great use for Botox is giving your eyebrows a little lift. To do this, we inject the Botox into the lateral brow depressors, which are muscles that pull down on the outer edges of your eyebrows.

By releasing these muscles, your brows can lift, giving you a bright-eyed and more vibrant look.

5. Masseter Botox

There’s a treatment called masseter Botox that tackles two issues at the same time. First, if you have a problem with jaw clenching and/or teeth grinding, Botox injections into the masseter muscles around your jaw are highly effective.

As we quiet the masseter muscles, the treatment can simultaneously give your face a slimmer appearance as those large muscles on the sides of your jaw become less prominent after treatment.

If you’d like to learn more about any of these novel Botox applications, we invite you to contact one of our offices in Rancho Santa Margarita, Orange, or Mission Viejo, California, today to schedule a consultation.