A Doctor With 20 Years of Experience Answers the Injectable Questions Everyone Is Too Nervous to Ask

These days the internet will confidently tell you to put beef tallow on your face, fly to Korea for a “reset,” and inject whatever treatment is trending this week. Meanwhile, real life is happening: makeup starts sitting weird in your 30s, fine lines show up in HD, and suddenly “Should I get Botox?” becomes a recurring thought right next to “Why is everything so expensive?”

On I’m Fun Now, host Sazan Hendrix opens up the Beauty Hotline with Dr. Zara of Zavant Aesthetics, a beauty doctor who’s been in the game for 20 years. They take real listener questions, and the answers are the opposite of everything your FYP is telling you. 

No salmon sperm facials. No 12-step routines. No icy-cold foreheads. Just a real guide to aging well without losing your face in the process.

The Smart Girl’s Guide to Botox and Injectables, According to a Beauty Doctor

How to find a good injector (and spot a bad one immediately)

Dr. Zara says the first thing you should do when you walk into a provider’s office is look at their face. “If you go somewhere for natural results and you’re seeing someone welcoming you with lips that’s huge, frozen face, no emotion, and you expect that person will give you natural?” 

She also says the biggest red flag in her industry is “overfilling and following the desire of the patient without integrity.” A good injector will tell you no. Sazan can vouch for that personally, because the one time she pushed a different provider for more Botox than recommended, she ended up with one side of her smile not working for months.

What to actually get and what to run from

If you’re just starting and want something affordable that actually works, Dr. Zara says microneedling with PRP is the move. “I love this treatment. It really makes a difference and it’s not pricey. It’s affordable and result-driven.” For hydration, SkinVive works “very quietly but does what it’s supposed to do” and lasts 6 to 9 months. Sazan says she didn’t realize how good it was until she traveled and her skin stayed plump the entire trip. 

As for what to skip? The salmon sperm injections trending all over TikTok. Dr. Zara is seeing patients come in with delayed nodules and bumps. “Your body is telling you something. Painful—don’t do it. Listen to your body.” And beef tallow on your face? “It doesn’t belong on a face at all,” Hendrix says. “It belongs in a skillet when we make our scrambled eggs.”

The only skincare routine you actually need

Dr. Zara has been doing this for two decades and her routine is embarrassingly simple. Morning: hyaluronic acid on a wet face with wet fingers (this is the trick, otherwise it sits on top like silicone), vitamin C serum, moisturizer, sunscreen. No cleanser in the morning. Just water. “You can over-strip your skin with too much cleansing,” Hendrix points out.

Night: double cleanse to get everything off, hyaluronic acid again, then retinol two to three times a week. If your skin is sensitive, sandwich the retinol between two layers of moisturizer until you build tolerance. That’s the whole thing. And she means it. “Don’t come and spend money with me if you will not going to do the work at home,” she says. “It’s teamwork and you’re the most responsible part of this teamwork.”

Stopping Botox doesn’t ruin your face

The biggest fear keeping people from starting Botox is what happens when they stop. Dr. Zara says it’s simple: “You will slowly come back where you started, but you will look better than before you started because you already had some improvements.” 

Sazan backs this up. When her Botox wears off, the wrinkles come back softer than they were before. The only way stopping goes badly is if you were overfilled with filler in the first place. “If you add volume that you don’t need, you will be overstretching your skin,” Dr. Zara says. Replacing what you’ve naturally lost is totally fine. Piling extra onto an already full face is where things go wrong. 

Listen to the full episode on I’m Fun Now with Sazan Hendrix, available wherever you listen to podcasts.

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