Botox To Go!

Now it’s not just takeaways you can get delivered to your door. ALICE HARTDAVIS braves the new. . .

AS SAFFI the nurse looms in with her needle-topped syringe and warns me that there will be a sharp scratch, I feel remarkably relaxed.

It’s not just because I’m no stranger to Botox — having had the treatment on and off over the past 15 years — but because I’m not reclining on a hard couch in a medical clinic.

Instead, I am sitting on my bed in my own bedroom.

This is a first for me. In all these years, I’ve only ever had Botox injections from a doctor in a clinic. I’ve never been treated in the back room of a hairdresser’s and I’ve certainly never been to one of those dodgy Botox ‘parties’ I’ve heard about.

Let me explain. It has become a jokey cliché of modern life to say, in response to any problem a friend poses: ‘There’s an app for that!’ But, like all clichés, it makes us laugh because it’s true.

Don’t know where to find a Botox practitioner? No worries. Now, there’s an app for that —Ruuby — and although it’s not yet available in Ireland, it won’t be long before Irish customers will be able to summon a practitioner to their homes or offices at a time that suits with a few taps of a smart phone.

Ruuby is billed as London’s digital beauty concierge, providing a five-star service of beauty experts who can rush round to clients’ homes to provide anything from a blow-dry or a spray tan to eyelash extensions or eyebrow microblading.

The business recently swallowed up mobile beauty rival Perfect 10 and its famed Black Label services, boasting high-calibre beauty therapists who travel with elite clients around the globe. So it is only a matter of time before it lands on our shores.

But do we really want Botox on the back of a bike like a takeaway supper? Or is this an app too far? Botox — botulinum toxin — is a cosmetic medical procedure. Is this making the treatment too casual and too easily available? Could that be dangerous?

There is no legal requirement that the cosmetic injections are done in a clinical setting and, for years, practitioners have been offering treatments in back rooms at hairdresser’s, box rooms at pharmacies and suburban sitting rooms at the aforementioned Botox parties (not a good idea, but not illegal).

WHILE in theory I’m not against outof-doctors-office Botox, in practice what has worried me is who Ruuby is going to send round.

Thanks to my job as a beauty journalist, I’ve been lucky enough to have had the finest in the business freeze my frown lines and I confess to jitters at the thought of putting my face in the hands of an unknown.

The company insists it has a strict vetting process but, even if a practitioner is well qualified in the technical administration of Botox and follows the appropriate guidelines, giving cosmetic injections is as much an art as a science. In that respect, it’s not unlike hairdressing. Any hairdresser can give you a haircut but, even if you tell them roughly what to do and explain what has worked for you in the past, you can’t guarantee that you will get a great result. And, like Botox, it will take a good few months for the effects to wear off.

It’s fair to say I’m not mad keen on letting some random person loose on my face. But when I open the door to Saffi Heighes, I am wrong-footed. I like her immediately. In her stripy Breton top and skinny jeans, she looks the essence of normality.

The big fear among most people who try injectables — even more than the fear of something going wrong — is that they will end up looking weird.

Saffi looks 40, tops, though I later discover she is, in fact, 46 and has three children aged four to 11. She’s carrying a soft, brown leather case with looped straps, like a wider sheet music case. No doctor’s briefcase full of syringes, then? ‘No,’ she says, laughing. ‘I like to be discreet.’ A nurse since she was 18, Saffi trained in injectable cosmetic techniques 13 years ago — she is classified as a ‘nurse prescriber’, which means she is legally able both to prescribe and administer Botox.

She found she enjoyed the work and has been offering home treatments ever since to devoted clients, although she still works one day a week as a nurse in a busy A&E department.

While she is taking my medical history, Saffi is studying my face, working out where to place her needles. We discuss the result I’d like to achieve.

I want to still be able to move my forehead, but wouldn’t mind softening the crow’s feet around my eyes and the pleated frown between my eyebrows.

When I raise my eyebrows, there are four horizontal lines across my forehead. Saffi suggests quietening them down a notch with a halfdose of toxin and treating the diagonal ‘bunny lines’ that appear at the top of my nose when I wrinkle it.

She takes out her vials of toxin, lines up her syringes, sterile wipes and vial of toxin, doses her hands with antibacterial gel, pulls on her latex gloves and sets to work.

FIRST, she takes a marker and places dots where the injections need to go. Then she starts on the jabs. I don’t want any numbing cream, as I know these injections hardly hurt. It all takes about seven minutes — that’s it.

It feels strange to have a cosmetic medical treatment at home but, as I wave goodbye to Saffi as if she was a friend who’d dropped in for a cuppa, I can see the attraction.

No travelling to the clinic, no hanging around in a waiting room, no going back to your office sporting giveaway needle marks — and reasonable prices (Ruuby charges from €290 for Botox).

You can have the treatment at 7pm and, by the morning, your face will look normal.

Saffi leaves her mobile number, so that if I have any concerns or need the treatment tweaked (for free), I can.

If you want your Botox to be an entirely private affair, this is clearly the way to do it. But never has it been more important to be sure a practitioner is properly trained.