Successful travel, especially when traveling solo, often requires having confidence in yourself. Ways to gain confidence can be achieved through careful planning, preparation, and being the best version of yourself.

While you are no doubt naturally beautiful inside and out just as you are, it’s sometimes empowering to enhance your outward appearance to elevate your confidence even more. Looking and feeling your best can make you more comfortable and self-assured as you explore new surroundings and meet new faces.

Get ready to feel confident and refreshed with these top non-surgical beauty treatments that provide a quick and effective, hassle-free way to accentuate your already beautiful self. From wrinkle-smoothing injections to skin-brightening facials, here’s a roundup of top non-invasive beauty treatments to consider before your next trip.

Radiant and Ready: Must-Have Beauty Treatments Before Embarking on Your World Journey

Benefits of Non-Surgical Beauty Treatments

Travel often brings unexpected opportunities, such running into the next love of your life in Paris or making important business contacts while networking in London. Looking polished makes a good first impression which can open doors to meaningful connections, and taking care of your appearance often goes hand-in-hand with practicing self-care.

Non-surgical beauty treatments offer numerous advantages over surgical procedures, especially for travelers planning last-minute escapes. Non-surgical treatments like Botox, fillers, or laser therapies typically require little to no recovery time, meaning you can leave treatments until just days or even hours before your trip.

Many non-surgical treatments offer immediate or very fast results. Dermal fillers, for example, provide instant volume to the skin, while Botox shows visible improvements within days. Invasive surgical procedures carry a far greater risk for complications like infections and scarring, as well as usually requiring longer recovery periods to heal or see noticeable results.

Non-surgical treatments such as the following suggestions are subtle ways you can enhance your beauty with natural-looking results. They are also far more affordable, convenient, and less painful than surgical options.

Hydrafacials

A Hydrafacial makes an excellent beauty treatment you can do before travelling to ensure your skin looks refreshed before a trip. This quick, non-invasive treatment, coupled with the instant glow and hydration it provides, is a great way to prepare your skin for the challenges of travel, such as dehydration often caused by flying and exposure to new different environments, as well as reducing the risk of breakouts while traveling.

This is a treatment that provides a lot of bang for your buck in just a single session, combining deep cleansing, exfoliation, extraction, hydration, and antioxidant protection all in on procedure. It’s suitable for most skin types including those with sensitive skin, and won’t cause redness, irritation, or other unwanted side effects right before a trip.

Remove dead skin cells and allow your fresh skin underneath to emerge. You’ll see dirt and debris loosened from your pores, and blackheads and clogged pores extracted with minimal discomfort.

The treatment infuses your skin with intensive moisturizers and hydrating serums rich in antioxidants, peptides, and hyaluronic acid to protect and rejuvenate. Best part is that hydrafacials provide immediate radiance and smoothness, so you’ll notice glowing skin right after the treatment and can be ready to take off on a trip the next day.

Skin Laser Treatments

Skin laser treatments utilize lasers to fix a variety of skin issues like scars, wrinkles, hyperpigmentation, redness, and overall skin texture. Lasers help remove damaged layers of skin, stimulate collagen production, and treat skin that’s affected by broken capillaries.

There are several different types of laser treatments, with the most popular being ablative lasers such as those used in CO2 laser treatment. Non-ablative lasers are an alternative option and use intense pulsed light. There are also so-called fractional CO2 laser treatments.

Both non-ablative and fractional laser treatments can be good options if you are planning a trip, but unlike some of our other beauty treatments, laser treatments should be done at least a few weeks before you take off for your trip.  If you’re hoping to get ablative laser treatment, note that recovery time is much greater than the previous two options, requiring around 4-6 weeks for your skin to fully heal.

While multiple sessions may be required, laser treatments often provide long-term improvements to skin issues such as wrinkles, sunspots, hyperpigmentation, acne scars, and more. The result is plumper and more youthful looking skin.

Plane travel is known to dehydrate skin and laser treatments may temporarily make your skin more sensitive to environmental changes. Be sure to pack moisturizer in your carry-on to ensure you can keep your skin hydrated after laser treatments while traveling.

Chemical Peels

Look to chemical peels for an easy way to exfoliate your skin and remove weathered outer skin layers with their dead skin cells. The result will be smoother and more even-toned skin, along with reducing the signs of wrinkles, acne scars, and hyperpigmentation.

Many types of pigmentation issues including age spots can be remedied and there are varying degrees of peels to choose from depending on how aggressive you want to get. It’s recommended you stick with either light or medium peels before planned travel and avoid deep peels.

Light peels typically have minimal side effects, any of which will usually clear up in a matter of a few days. Such peels often use mild acids like alpha-hydroxy acids such as glycolic or lactic acid to help improve texture, tone, and brightness of skin

Medium peels on the other hands will use trichloroacetic acid to help penetrate deeper into your skin to tackle issues like wrinkles and acne scars. Deep peels using phenol can help remedy issues like severe sun damage and extensive hyperpigmentation but often require several weeks to recover from redness, swelling, and potential peeling.

Whichever peel you decide to get, make sure to practice safe SPF protection from the sun since peels make your skin far more sensitive to sunlight and potential sunburns.

Waxing and Laser Hair Removal

Who doesn’t want smooth hairless legs, underarms, and a bikini line before a beach getaway? Both waxing and laser hair removal are great options for long-lasting, hassle-free hair removal, so you don’t need to waste your precious vacation time constantly shaving and can cave space in your luggage by to having to pack razors or shaving cream.   

Waxing treatments will be the far more cost-effective option, being a fraction of what laser hair removal costs. Although laser hair removal offers a much more permanent solution after a few treatments, waxing can still last upwards of 3-6 weeks which is often more than most vacations will last.  

Waxing removes hair from the root, which makes it more difficult to grow back quickly like it can with simple shaving. And if you get waxing treatments regularly, you may start to notice your regrowth of hair becoming less frequent or that new hairs come in much finer.

You really only need to allow a few days before traveling to allow potential irritation from waxing to ease, and you can use aloe vera to help reduce any irritation more quickly.

Laser hair removal is often more effective on dark hair and lighter skin tones. It provides greater longer-lasting results but requires a bit more planning. Sessions may only take 15-60 minutes, but each session should be booked 4-6 weeks apart to achieve the best results, meaning you will want to look at setting up a laser hair treatment plan well before any planned trips.

Teeth Whitening

Get your smile looking its brightest for all those travel selfies by looking into teeth whitening treatments. There are several different ways to go about teeth whitening, with options for you to DIY at home or visit a professional.

There are countless over-the-counter whitening products and professional whitening kits you can use at home. Doing it yourself will prove far cheaper than getting in-office professional whitening, but often takes a longer period of treatments due to such home treatments being less powerful.   

Dentists make use of stronger gels with bleaching agents that often contain hydrogen peroxide. Lasers are then used for the whitening process that can see your teeth becoming several shades lighter in just a matter of a few hours.

Over-the-counter products on the other hand often take daily use over many weeks to start seeing results, and even then, will likely be less noticeable than professional dental treatments.

There are adhesive whitening strips, trays, and even whitening toothpastes that all claim to make your teeth whiter, but results can vary widely between products and there’s never any guarantee you will be pleased with results like you may get with professional treatments.

The best part of whitening your teeth is that once they’re whitened, there’s no need for further daily maintenance during your trip. Whitening treatments can last months or more so long as you avoid foods and drinks that may stain such as coffee and red wine, and even then you really only need to abstain from such pleasures for a few days after treatments.

Botox

Smiling a lot is definitely good for your soul, but not so much for avoiding so-called dynamic wrinkles which can be a result of repetitive facial movements over many years. But fear not, as you can still choose to keep displaying that beautiful smile of yours since Botox can come to the rescue.

Botox treatments help to block nerve signals in various muscles where it is injected, allowing them to relax for smoother-looking skin with less noticeable wrinkles. This non-invasive wrinkle-fixer is commonly used to get rid of crow’s feet as well as forehead and frown lines.

Visible results can be seen within just a few weeks and the results can last months before needing injections again. Skilled professionals are now able to offers subtle results that won’t drastically alter your normal appearance as much as you might think.

The procedure can be completed in under a half hour and requires minimal recovery time. You can get Botox during a lunch break or a few days before your trip and still have plenty of time to pack.

Lash Extensions

Make your eyes pop with longer, fuller, and more defined lashes without the need for mascara or lash curlers. Achieve that glamorous look without the need to pack or apply extra eye makeup while traveling by getting a lash extension treatment which can last as long as 6 weeks and offers an immediate way to get hassle-free voluminous long lashes.

Lash extensions come in a variety of lengths, thicknesses, and materials to suit your personal preferences. They benefit busy travelers who are always on the move since it eliminates one step of your daily makeup routine.

Lash extensions are also water-resistant, meaning you can swim in that hotel pool or at the beach without worrying about your mascara running or smudging. Consider scheduling your lash extension treatment a few days prior to your trip to ensure your extensions are fresh and to give time for any potential redness around the eyes to subside.