Glow-Ups Don’t Involve Surgery, and Botox Takes Real Skill

My American friends often think glow-ups involve surgery, or that you need to be put under for them. They also think Botox is close to plastic surgery, or they’re biased against it in some nonspecific way.

These two misunderstandings drive a lot of hesitancy among friends who are thinking about coming to Korea for a glow-up. Even though they can ask for my help to have the smoothest trip ever, and are genuinely interested in K-beauty and glow-ups, they feel uncertain.

There’s no reason for this uncertainty to continue. Let’s clear up the confusion so you can glow up with confidence.

Glow-Ups Don’t Involve Surgery

A skincare glow-up does not involve scalpels or general anesthesia. At a glow-up clinic in Korea, you get treatments using specialized machines that target skin irregularities or inject substances to chemically enhance your skin. No operating room. No surgeon. No recovery from being put under.

Many of my friends say they want glow-up skin treatments but don’t want surgery. Good news: glow-ups don’t involve surgery. They aren’t in the same category. Glow-ups are what you do when you don’t want surgery.

In Korea, women (and more than a few men) use glow-ups to get as far as they can without surgery. But at some point, skin sags so much that no amount of glowing up can fix it. At that point, only a scalpel can nip and tuck away excess skin. You can get quite far with glow-up treatments though. Technological advancements allow us to maintain that youthful dewy glow for a long time without needing surgery.

Have you ever had a mole removed with laser treatment? Glow-up treatments that involve lasers are a broad riff on that. Different lasers reach different layers of the skin to blast impurities and stimulate those layers into performing better. Sofwave, for example, reaches a layer slightly below the surface, providing treatment that wasn’t possible before. Ulthera goes much deeper, addressing issues at connective tissues and in the muscular layer.

Precision Botox Requires Know-How

Now, all this fuss about Botox. I remember when I was in my 20s, a woman in her 40s in my office went on and on about how Botox is a poison and why would anyone put that in their bodies? I sat quietly and didn’t particularly feel like offering that I’d had cosmetic Botox treatment in Korea recently. But in Korea, Botox is both common and commonly used as a preventive measure for wrinkle delay.

Specifically, Botox is used to try to delay forehead lines in your 20s. When I was 27 or so, I noticed that when I raised my eyebrows, my forehead started to crinkle with horizontal lines. It hadn’t before, and I realized that everyone older than me had foreheads that wrinkled, and everyone younger than me seemed not to. It was one of my first physical signs of aging.

When I went to Korea, the doctor who examined me noticed my forehead lines as well and “threw in” some Botox as part of my treatment for the day. The injections are just shots from a syringe. But the manner of application was interesting. It wasn’t all deposited in one spot. Instead, it was distributed all over my forehead in little squirts, just below the surface.

What Botox does on a visual level is freeze your skin so it doesn’t move. In the area around my Botox injections, my forehead didn’t wrinkle. But what I noticed was that other parts of my forehead did move, sometimes in a compensatory way. Occasionally, it meant that my forehead did move, but in an odd, goofy way. Wrinkle patterns are everything for proper Botox treatment. Even aesthetic Botox requires a fair amount of experience and skill to administer well.

By the way, I make a distinction between aesthetic Botox and medical Botox because actually, the first time I learned about it was more than 20 years ago from a neurologist friend at Massachusetts General Hospital who used it to treat chronic headaches. Yes, my friend from my 20s, Botox is, strictly speaking, a toxin. But it’s a toxin that can do a lot of good—for beauty and for your brain too, it turns out.

There is real technique involved in Botox treatment, which alters the result. And I think that’s where Korean dermatologists have a real edge: experience administering Botox in all the ways people have asked to freeze their faces, over and over again. Botox is cheap—as low as $50 per application. So accessible that my clinic doesn’t even charge me for it when I get it once in a while. Botox wears off by the third month, which means people return several times a year for more. This creates tremendous volume, and that volume translates into a ton of reps for Korean doctors, and a knowledge base and savvy around just where in your wrinkle patterns to put those Botox injections. That kind of know-how is difficult for others to replicate.

So there you have it. Don’t worry about scalpels and don’t just come for the cheap prices. Come with the assurance that you’re not going to be put under for your glow-up, and if you choose well, you’re going to be cared for by some of the most experienced hands in the world.