Tweakments – No Pain No Gain?

Do tweakments need to hurt in order to give you a result? It’s a popular belief among the tweakment-curious, in line with the old adage that you have to suffer to be beautiful but here’s the good news: it’s not true. Or not always true. Also, practitioners are very focussed on making any treatment as comfortable for you as possible, with, say, numbing cream, or one of those distracting buzzing metal t-bar devices, or local anaesthetic for anything really intense. They’re not sadists, after all, and they want you to like them and, one day, come back for more.

Which ones hurt the most?

Energy treatments designed to traumatise the collagen into renewing itself are the most likely to hurt. These use light energy (laser, IPL), radiofrequency energy (radiofrequency and RF needling), ultrasound energy (ultrasound skin tightening), plasma energy, or just plain heat energy (eg Tixel). Getting enough of that energy into the skin to do the job is not going to go unnoticed by your nerve endings. If you want to see my full 0-10 Tweakments Pain Scale, it’s here.

But with all of these, the pain level very much depends on the intensity of the treatment – on how much your practitioner cranks up the energy levels. Often, they like to offer a series of nice, gentle, low-level energy treatments rather than one scary big-bang procedure. That’s because people find it much more tolerable, there’s hardly any downtime and you’ll see much the same results in the end. It will take longer and may cost more, because you’re taking up more clinic time with all those appointments, but you’ll get there.

So, you absolutely could get the gain without anything like the pain you might imagine.

How much do injections hurt?

You hardly need me to tell you that anything involving sticking needles into the skin – injectable toxin, fillers and injectable moisture treatments – can also hurt, yet cosmetic injections are much less painful than you would expect. The needles used for toxin treatments are very fine (so you hardly feel them), and most fillers contain lidocaine (a numbing agent) so that you don’t really notice them as they are injected into the skin.

Microneedling, where multiple tiny needles are zinged into your skin by a motorised treatment head so fast that it glides across your skin – is more challenging, but numbing cream is a great help.

Which tweakments don’t hurt at all?

LED light therapy. You feel nothing, other than maybe a little warmth – yet with time and multiple treatments, you certainly get results, whether that’s with red light (for general skin repair and reduced inflammation) or blue light (for acne).

Or, specifically for the body, there’s Low-level Laser Therapy (LLLT), like the hugely popular Emerald Laser. You’ll need multiple sessions, but its a pain-free technology that aims to reduce fat and improve energy levels.

To find a recommended practitioner near you for any of these tweakments, head to our trusted practitioner list.

Also, take a look at these articles:

• 10 Things that Make Tweakments more Painful
• Pain-free Tweaks: Here’s How