What does 6 months post botox look like?

My one and only time trying botox.

Before we answer the question “What does 6 months post botox look like?” I want to give a little bit of back story into why I wanted to get botox, and what my skin care journey has been so far.

Over the years I have spent a truly insane amount of money on skin care. I started going to the dermatologist at 13, where they promptly put me on birth control, for my cystic acne. I was also getting facial 1-2 times a month with chemical peels like salicylic acid peels. My teenage skin was regularly microdermabladed, and I wore sunscreen with religious fervor. Starting college I had perfect skin.

Then in college I picked up the worst case of impetigo at Disneyland. It resulted it deep pock like scaring throughout around my nose, cheeks, and lips. I have very few photos of that because it was 2015ish, so peak instagram aesthetic culture. I airbrushed every photo I felt self conscious in. Plus I was wearing a scarf to cover my face way before covid was even a thought in our minds. I did several rounds of microneedling for the scarring, which did help, but didn’t completely fix it.

Before Microneedling

I’ve been self conscious of the scarring and pore size for a while now, so for my 30th birthday I decided to try botox, which I’d heard could make pores smaller! And while I was there I also did 1 syringe of lip filler.

I did a micro-needling treatment where they pushed the botox into the tiny cuts from the micro-needling to firm my pores. I have to say it worked – my pores looked great (at first)! On the other hand it made my smile noticeably lopsided, and once again I avoided taking photos because I was embarrassed. Oof.

I’m going to show you a 6 month photo journey, so it seems only fair to share a before botox photo too:

Immediately after microneedling botox and lip filler, and a few hours later. 

One day post botox

I sent this photo to my mom one day post treatment absolutely thrilled with the results. I feel like the scarring is visibly less noticeable especially on my upper lip and my cheek here!

 

One week post botox

This is a week later as things had started to settle, and I felt like I was getting really dry, but still happy!

Two weeks post botox

Two weeks later you can really see that half of my face doesn’t smile. AND the other half smiles much less than normal. I felt really tight in my face. To me, even if my pores were invisible (they’re clearly not), I felt like it wouldn’t be worth not being able to smile!

One Month Later

As time went on somehow the lopsidedness got worse?? This is at one month, and I mostly stopped smiling with my teeth and switched to only smiling closed lips…

Which led me to more lip filler, which to be honest I absolutely loved, and still do, and still love.

2 months post botox

I still didn’t like my lopsided smile, but was trying to embrace that I was still having fun. We went to the Getty Center and to the Griffith Observatory, and it reminded me why living in California is actually the best.

3 months post botox

My smile had started to even out again! I was starting to pick up for fall photos, and we snuck in a weekend trip to the Botanical gardens in San Diego. Overall I felt like the scaring on my lips was still noticeably less, but my cheeks/nose pore size looked about the same!

4 months post botox 

I think this was my favorite month with the combination of I had most of my smile back, but my skin still looked really nice to me.

5 months post botox

For my birthday in November I took a makeup lesson, and from July-November this feels like my smile is pretty much back to normal:

6 months post botox

This is what my smile looks like, gummy, and big, and even and perfectly mine. At this point I think both the lip filled and the botox have been totally metastasized. It could be all in my head, but I feel like the scarring on my upper lip is a bit more visible again.

What I notice the most is that my pore size didn’t really change that much. My pores feel just as obvious in all of these photos as they felt in the before photo. I personally felt like the scarring on the lips wasn’t as noticeable. However, that could have been attributed to the lip filler as well.

I won’t do botox again, but I’m definitely glad that I tried it once. I had people tell me “oh it was just a bad injector.” And things like “you could inject more to the other side to even it out.” But I really didn’t want to do that. I hated how tight my face felt, and I wanted to show big emotions when I had them. I know people with flawless botox, and I love that for them! For me it’s not worth risking my smile again.

So if you were curious about what does 6 months post botox look like – it looks like that!

I still don’t like how big my pores are, and I’m experimenting with different skin care routines. But it’s safe to say that I’m not a botox person.

Getting botox was part of my overall mission to figure out who I am in my 30s. If that’s something you’re doing too then you might like:

How to figure out who you are now?

Life isn’t a newspaper – we don’t need to fit into a 4 inch column