What Is The Difference Between Botox And Dysport?
Begin with the trap rather than the biology — the trap is what costs people money.
The two products are measured on unrelated scales. A "unit" of one is not a unit of the other in any transferable sense; the numbers were established separately by each manufacturer's own potency assay and were never meant to translate. Clinics convert between them using a ratio that generally sits somewhere near two and a half to one, more of the second product than the first, adjusted by the individual injector's experience.
Which means a per-unit price, quoted without naming the product, is not a price. It's a number waiting for a denominator. Two clinics can advertise figures that look forty percent apart and end up charging you within a few dollars of each other for the same clinical effect. The reverse happens too, and neither party is being dishonest.
So the first question is never "how much per unit". It's "which product, how many of its units, and what does that total".
Where the actual difference sits
Both are purified preparations of the same bacterial toxin, and the part that does the work in your muscle is the same class of molecule. What differs is the packaging around it. The accessory proteins bundled with the active component differ in size and quantity, and the formulations are stabilised differently.
The practical consequence people report is spread. Injectors describe the second product travelling marginally wider around wherever the needle went. That is a property, not a defect, and whether it helps or hurts depends entirely on where it's going.
Somewhere broad, where you want a smooth and even result across a wide muscle, a bit of spread is doing you a favour. Somewhere narrow, next to a muscle you very much want left alone, it's a liability. The area around the eyebrow is the usual illustration: a few millimetres of unintended travel there and you have a heavy brow for three months.
Onset is the other reported difference. Several injectors describe the more diffusible product as showing up a day or so sooner. Both take ten to fourteen days to settle into their final result, and both last roughly the same three to four months. Anyone promising you a meaningfully longer duration from one over the other is describing hope rather than data.
When the choice genuinely matters
For most faces, most of the time, it doesn't. A competent injector gets an equivalent result from either, and the choice is made on habit, stock and cost.
It starts to matter in three situations.
If you've had one product before and were happy, staying put removes a variable. Your injector has a dose record that works.
If the target is small and the neighbours are important, the tighter-spreading option gives more control.
And if you've ever had an unusually short-lived result, a switch is a reasonable experiment, though the honest framing is that it's an experiment.
What to ask in the room
Which one are you using on me, and why that one for this area.
What's the total, in the product's own units, and what does that come to in money.
If I move to the other product later, how will you set the dose.
Three questions, thirty seconds, and they end most of the confusion this topic generates.
A note on how it gets sold
Promotions tend to attach to whichever product a practice bought recently, which is fine. Loyalty programmes attach to brands as well, and those quietly make switching feel expensive when it isn't.
Read past all of it. The variable that determines your result is the person injecting, their assessment of your muscles, and their willingness to use less than you asked for. The label on the vial is a long way down that list.
Two practical footnotes. If you're planning an appointment around something visible, allow the full fortnight before judging anything, and if the plan involves being outdoors afterwards, the forecast pages kept by the National Weather Service will settle whether that weekend is realistic. And for anyone wanting the underlying pharmacology rather than a summary of it, database access through the West New York Free Public Library System beats any manufacturer's website.
If all you need is confirmation that a given practice is an established local business, a directory such as the Hudson County Chamber of Commerce answers that question and only that question.