“How many units do I need?” is one of the first questions I get, and it’s usually asked the way you’d ask how many ounces are in a cup — like there’s a fixed answer. There isn’t. Units are a dose, not a package size, and the number that’s right for your forehead is specific to your face. Here’s how we actually decide.
A unit is a measure of strength, not volume
A unit of Botox or Dysport is a measure of biological activity — how much muscle-relaxing effect you’re getting. It is not a measure of how much liquid goes in. This matters because it’s the source of most of the confusion online, where people compare unit counts across clinics and across products as if they’re interchangeable.
They aren’t. Which brings up the thing that trips up almost everyone.
Botox units and Dysport units are not the same units
Dysport is dosed differently than Botox — roughly two and a half Dysport units to one Botox unit. So if you had 20 units of Botox last time and someone quotes you 50 units of Dysport, that is not a bigger treatment. That’s the same treatment in a different currency.
This is why comparing per-unit pricing between clinics is close to meaningless unless you know which product they’re quoting. A lower price per unit on Dysport looks like a deal right up until you realize you need more than twice as many of them. The treatment cost ends up comparable. Ask what the whole treatment costs, not what a unit costs.
What actually determines your dose
Four things, in roughly this order.
Which area we’re treating. Each area has its own typical range because the muscles are different sizes and do different work. The frown lines between your brows take more than the fine lines at the corners of your eyes. The masseter at the back of your jaw takes considerably more than either, because it’s a much stronger muscle.
How strong your muscle is. This is the big one, and it’s why two people getting the same area treated can need noticeably different amounts. If you’re expressive, if you squint in the sun, if you’ve been furrowing at a screen for twenty years, that muscle is developed. Developed muscle needs more to relax.
What you want. Softened is a different dose than smoothed. Some patients want the line gone. Others want to keep visible movement and just take the edge off. Both are valid and they are not the same number.
How you metabolize it. Some people simply burn through neurotoxin faster than others. We don’t know that at the first appointment — we learn it from how your first round behaves.
Why we don’t hand you a number over the phone
Because we’d be guessing, and the guess would either cost you money you didn’t need to spend or leave you disappointed at two weeks. Heather assesses your facial movement in person — she’ll have you frown, raise, squint — and dose to what your muscles are actually doing. That takes about a minute and it’s the difference between a result that fits your face and a result that fits an average.
More units is not better
The frozen look people are afraid of is almost always an over-dosing problem, and the forehead is where it shows up. Too much there and the brow drops, which reads heavy and tired — the opposite of what anyone wanted. We dose the forehead conservatively for exactly this reason.
Our approach is to start at a sensible dose and adjust. If two weeks in you’ve still got more movement than you wanted, we add at the follow-up. That’s a much better problem than the alternative, because there’s no way to take neurotoxin back out. You wait it out.
Your first round teaches us the second
Think of the first treatment as calibration. We record exactly what went where, and at your two-week check we see how your face responded. Maybe one side needed a little more. Maybe your forehead is stronger than it looked. That gets written down, and your next appointment starts from real information about your face instead of an estimate.
By the second or third round, your dosing is dialed in and the results get very consistent. Patients who’ve been with us a while mostly stop thinking about units entirely, because we’ve already solved it.
Reading the internet’s unit numbers
Every range you’ll find online is an average across a lot of different faces, and averages are a starting point, not a prescription. If your number comes in above or below what you read, that isn’t a red flag on its own — it usually just means your muscles aren’t average. What would be a red flag is a clinic quoting you a dose before anyone has looked at your face.
Come get an actual number
The fastest way to stop wondering is a consultation. Heather will look at how your face moves, tell you which areas are worth treating and which aren’t, and give you a real dose and a real treatment cost before anything happens. See more about Botox, Dysport, and Daxxify at Franco Aesthetics.
