How Does a Botox Brow Lift Work?

Hi, happy Monday. I'm board certified dermatologist Alex Snodgrass, and today I wanted to talk about one of the most requested features of Botox that I get from my patients. Everyone wants a Botox brow lift. Lifting the brows, creating more upper eyelid landscape, makes everyone feel more rested, more youthful, more approachable. And so I want to demonstrate today how we inject certain muscle groups to create that.

The first thing you want to do with Botox to get a brow lift is to take care of the brow depressors. This is a group of muscles right between the brows, in the glabella area, that typically act to bring the eyebrows in and down. If you relax those muscles with Botox, you essentially put them in a timeout, so they're not able to move. So there's one, here's two, this one has a little tail usually, right here, you can see on mine, three, four, perfect.

And then you have this muscle right here. This is called the frontalis. The frontalis muscle works to bring the eyebrows up. So with Botox, you want to largely leave that muscle group alone so it can continue to lift the brows. However, you have a circular muscle around the eye, right here, called the orbicularis oculi. And in this area specifically, when tightly clenching down on the eye, see how it pulls that eyebrow down? So if you lift the brow and do a little injection right there, you can get the perfect brow lift.

Now, if you need to get rid of those horizontal forehead lines, a couple of injections across the frontalis is okay. However, you want to stay high and make sure you're using light units.