Whether you get regular injectable treatments to combat your crow’s feet, or you’re thinking about booking your first lip filler appointment, how would you feel if your practitioner told you you’d be better off with a full face rejuvenation?

In recent years the aesthetic medicine industry has moved away from fish lips, sky-high eyebrows and immovable foreheads, and focused instead on more holistic and natural results.

A full face rejuvenation involves treating a range of different areas across the face and neck with hyaluronic acid filler and botulinum toxin (commonly known by the brand name Botox) including the cheeks, jowls, chin, ear lobes and neck.

While you may find this a terrifying prospect, the full-face approach is a useful way to tackle moderate aging changes for those between 35 and 55 years old. Treating the full face with filler avoids surgical intervention, evens out treatments to make no individual area stand out, and gives a subtle and overall youthful and refreshed look.

Newsweek spoke to two registered aesthetic practitioners, Dr. Sarah Hart, who has over 18 years of experience, and Dr. Manav Bawa, who is an award-winning cosmetic doctor, about this revolutionary technique.

What is a full face rejuvenation?

Simply put, a full face rejuvenation involves treating areas across the entire face to give an overall refreshed look. The face ages as a whole, so subtly treating the entire face gives a more balanced and subtle result.

“The goal is to subtly refresh your face by relaxing muscles with toxin and supporting facial curves with dermal filler,” Dr. Hart told Newsweek. “It usually refers to injectable treatments. You can also add peels, needling, or energy-based treatments like Intense Pulsed Light therapy, laser, or radiofrequency to improve the surface of your skin.”

Combined, Dr. Hart has seen these treatments give quite remarkable results without the need for surgery.

“If you release the neck muscles that pull the face downwards along the jawline at the same time as giving projection to the cheeks with filler, you get more lift than with either treatment separately. It’s a bit like renovating your whole house compared to just doing up the bathroom. Everything matches better and your face looks more balanced,” she said.

“Let’s say a patient comes in nasolabial lines—those are lines from the nose to the corner of the mouth,” Dr. Bawa said. “Rather than treating that small area, we would look at the face as a whole and see if there were other areas adding that are causing the problem. We may need to lift the cheeks to reduce mouth wrinkles or look at the effect that drooping on the temples may be doing on the eyes.

“What we’re really trying to do is create harmony and a really natural look by improving every area of the face together.”

So, what are the limits?

“If you have droopy upper eyelids, bags under your eyes or excess skin along your jawline,” says Dr. Hart, “then you might find a surgical procedure addresses these more effectively. Surgery definitely still has a place when there is excess skin.”

Regulation in the United Kingdom and the U.S.

Despite recent successful efforts to implement regulations on dangerous aesthetic practices in the United Kingdom, there is still a long way to go before laws comprehensibly protect patients from rogue practitioners. Currently, in the U.K. both medical and non-medical professionals can administer botulinum toxin and filler injections—everyone from a qualified specialist doctor, to a beauty therapist.

The National Register of Accredited Practitioners’ Save Face report said that “Botulinum toxin injections, dermal fillers and other ‘minimally invasive’ cosmetic treatments can be administered by anyone, regardless of their qualifications. In addition to their lack of qualifications, untrained practitioners often purchase cheap, unlicensed products over the internet and the implications of this can be dire.”

In the United States, according to an essay on the career site Indeed.com, in order to administer botulinum toxin injections “you must be a physician, physician assistant, dentist, registered nurse or another licensed healthcare practitioner. The minimum degree requirement for most of these professionals is a four-year bachelor’s degree in pre-medicine, biology or related science.”

Does It Hurt?

Both first-time aesthetic and cosmetic patients, as well as more experienced customers, will probably be wondering how committing to a full-face rejuvenation might affect their lives in the short term, whether they will be able to handle the pain, and most importantly, whether the results look natural.

To combat all these concerns, Dr. Bawa said that “the pre-treatment is the most important part. I always emphasize that we need to spend plenty of time with our patients to really understand them, and what they’re looking for. Then we can examine them and see how what they want can fit in with what is possible, so they can understand the limits of the treatment and we can manage their expectations.”

The practitioner can use the consultation to let the patient know exactly what is going to happen, manage expectations, answer any questions and ensure that the results are an all-around success.”

“Personally, I think toxin stings,” Dr. Hart said, “There are a couple of points in the eyebrows where the injections make my eyes water! But a lot of my patients say toxin and filler injections don’t bother them. I find filler more comfortable as it contains local anasthetic, which really helps. We also have lots of tricks to improve comfort like ice, numbing cream, distraction, breathing, toe wriggling and a little buzzy vibrating tool to confuse the nerves.”

But will the results look natural when you’re altering the whole face? Dr. Bawa heavily champions the natural look.

“One thing I find patients are really afraid of is looking very, very artificial and fake as many people do on TV or Instagram,” she said. “And so I find I really need to reassure patients that this won’t be the case even though we’re using a good amount of dermal filler, what I will do is use it strategically to lift the skin and help ease those wrinkles or deeper lines.”

A good practitioner will space the treatments out over a good amount of time, which will not only help with fitting them around your schedules but also your bank account. Dr. Bawa spaces the treatments out over two to six months, “so it feels like baby steps and the patient never feels like it’s going too fast.”

“I really like people to go away after treatment and report back that their friends and family say ‘wow you look really fresh have you been on holiday or are you using a new skincare brand,'” she said.

Dr. Hart’s mantra is “they will notice, but they won’t know.”

When performed by an experienced, qualified medical practitioner, “treating the whole face will actually make it less obvious that you’ve had anything done, as it will balance the face and not draw the eye to one particular area” she said.

How much does it cost?

Cost is another thing to take into consideration when thinking about a full face rejuvenation treatment.

“I work in the United Kingdom and I charge anything from £1,980 to £4,900 ($2,183 to $5404),” Dr. Bawa said. “It depends on the amount of product used. The results last about two years on average with small adjustments and top-ups following that every six to 12 months, so that large payment would be a one-off.”

“Again, the whole concept of a full face rejuvenation is to provide a holistic approach all over the face so our patients come out and look very natural,” she said. “Most importantly, they look the best that they can for their age, they don’t look fake, they don’t look like they’ve had work done and they look naturally the best that they can.”