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Nowadays, medical aesthetic injections have become very popular, and the places where people receive injections are no longer limited to professional institutions such as beauty salons. They are becoming more common in everyday life and at home, so it is common for one needle to be used for multiple injections. Needle manufacturers usually advertise that their brand of needle can be used hundreds of times. Is this really the case? To investigate the deformation of injection needles and the subjective feelings of patients after multiple injections of botulinum toxin for facial mesotherapy, we selected three commonly used 30G, 31G, and 32G meso needle and injected them 3, 5, and 10 times in a row, compared the deformation of the needle tip and the subjective feelings of patients, and performed scanning electron microscopy imaging after each injection.

A total of 45 meso needles were evaluated. Comparing different facial injection areas, the most damaged needle tip was 38.4% after glabellar injection, followed by lateral canthus 27.9%, forehead 27.5%, and midface 23.1%. Regardless of the facial injection area, the average percentage of needle deformation was 14.8% after 3 injections, 19.6% after 5 injections, and 29.2% after 10 injections. The smaller the needle size, the lower the percentage of damage.

*Needle Tip Damage Percentage: It is obtained by measuring the area and calculating the percentage of deformed area, standardized and statistically analyzed.

30G meso needle: control (left), after 10 glabellar injections (center), the damaged area on the needle tip surface is marked with a red box (right).

Discuss this study in detail

Data from studies of different facial areas showed that mechanical damage to the needle tip was most significant when treating glabellar lines. This may be because glabellar lines require injection of botulinum toxin through skin into dense muscle. In contrast, crow's feet and forehead lines are injected at a shallower level and target looser muscle tissue, resulting in lessdamage to the needle tip.

In terms of needle size, the study found that the smallest 32G meso needle had the least tip deformation, followed by 31G and 30G meso needles. Although the study sample only had 45 meso needles, this trend is worth noting because it is generally believed that the smaller the needle, the more damage it causes when it penetrates the skin. Therefore, it is recommended that a 32G meso needle be used for facial mesotherapy botulinum toxin injections.

Based on the above studies, we recommend that when performing facial mesotherapy botulinum toxin treatment, changing the needle after 3-5 injections may reduce the force required to penetrate the skin, thereby improving injection accuracy. A study of facial treatment of forehead lines showed that the force required to insert a deformed needle into the skin increased after multiple injections, preventing the injector from accurately controlling the depth of the needle tip. When using a blunt needle to treat frown lines, the injector may inadvertently push the needle deeper, delivering the drug to the interwoven frontalis or levator palpebrae superioris muscles.

In addition to injection accuracy, patients reported that pain and skin pulling discomfort increased significantly as the number of punctures increased, but detailed data statistics and analysis were not performed in this study.

30g 31g 32g meso needles

Conclusion
Our results support the obvious fact that the more times a needle punctures a patient's skin, the greater the damage and the lower the integrity of the needle surface. Our study provides objective evidence of needle tip deformation after botulinum toxin injection. Now you know why you often felt pain when you injected in the past. So next time, whether you are in a beauty salon or injecting yourself, remember to remind the injector to change the needle in time according to the actual situation of the injection to ensure a good effect and injection experience.