Should YOUR husband have Botox?
. . . or is he secretly having it already
Acouple of months ago my youngest daughter introduced me to the daffy pleasures of the Face Swap app on her smartphone. Here’s how it works; you take a two-person selfie and then let the clever application’s software magically swap over one another’s facial features.
In our case, this meant my grey and bristly kisser being transplanted on to my reliably photogenic 17-year-old daughter’s face, while her delicate alabaster complexion, bright eyes and pert nose now made up an oddly youthful visage on my fat head. I should have found the resulting image amusing but was quietly horrified.
The long, brunette curtains of my daughter’s shiny, luscious hair only seemed to intensify my witchy and rapidly atrophying countenance. It was as if lily Savage had discovered the conditioner and hair straighteners but had not had time to trowel on the slap; sunken, sad and rheumy eyes, a cruel punchinello mouth, a sagging jawline, and a general look of narky disapproval. I looked mean and knackered, like an old ventriloquist’s dummy. In drag.
All of which was a bit of a shock. I’d always kidded myself that I looked oK-ish for my age, and as a recent divorcee now back on the dating scene I’d been told (i.e. kidded) that I could pass for younger than my 53 years, but Face Swap had provided me with a cruel wake-up call.
‘Do I always look so angry?’ I asked my daughter. ‘ pretty much,’ she answered, rather too abruptly.
‘But David Beckham is always frowning and he is very handsome, right?’
‘ Dad,’ she said, stating the glaringly obvious, ‘ You are so not David Beckham.’
‘ What about when I smile?’ I persisted, somewhat unwisely.
‘Your face goes all creased and your eyes disappear.’ ouch!
So I decided to do what, as I would later learn, pretty much every 40-plus male film star and TV personality also does and submit to the needle. It was time to get some Botox. or ‘Brotox’ as us secretly vain middle-aged men like to call it.
I made an appointment with london’s finest Brotox administer, Dr Michael prager of Wimpole Street.
Most of Dr prager’s clients are female but he’s seeing a steep rise in male patients at his clinic — said to be the largest consumer of Botox in europe.
‘I’d say around ten per cent,’ says prager. ‘I’ve seen 20 patients today and three were males, so it’s actually more than ten per cent.’
Not that these men are telling anyone about their visits. According to research by Rightclinic.com, of the ten per cent of British men undergoing cosmetic procedures — mostly 35- to 45-years- old and newly divorced — one in five keep their lunchtime treatments to themselves, with 11 per cent even paying by cash so the Brotox bill does not show up in bank or credit card statements.
Did I tell anyone I was going? of course not. Brotox is a shameless vanity, an expensive, self-indulgent secret that would not play well as pub-stool badinage. I think I’d rather admit to a thing for women’s hosiery than admit to cosmetic surgery. It really is that embarrassing.
I did tell one colleague, mind — a gay man in his mid-40s. I’ve long suspected that my friend’s skin looks unfeasibly taut around the eyes and forehead.
‘Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been having it for years,’ he confirmed over a coffee. ‘little and often. Nothing too severe. No man one wants that startled, expressionless Amanda Holden look.’
GooDjob then that my German-born aesthetic doctor, nicknamed ‘ Dr Natural’, is the maverick genius responsible for what has become known as ‘ the english look’ — skilful needlework that freshens up a face rather than creating the creepily smooth foreheads and startled cartoon eyes you see every week on the Britain’s Got Talent panel.
prager’s methods are subtle. He likes to focus on the face as a whole, sending clients away looking better, not necessarily different.
I am sceptical, but prager’s genius for turning back time becomes evident before I take to the chair, before any hypodermic is primed.
‘Dr prager. How old do you think I am?’ I ask. The doc examines me closely, his own clearly un-toxed brow furrowed in thought. ‘I reckon you are... 38.’ It is a wonderful moment. Two minutes in, no money spent, no toxins injected and already I am 15 years younger.
Still, he thinks I could do better. I am guided towards an apparatus that looks like a piece of gym equipment reconfigured as disco lighting; a stateof-the-art Vectra M3 3D imaging system for the face and neck.
The machine takes a 360- degree picture of my head before sophisticated software transforms it into hyper- detailed, three- dimensional rendering on the computer screen.
THesight of my bonce on Dr prager’s desktop as some ancient, saggy-faced bust, is even more disturbing than my daughter’s Face Swap demonstration.
‘Many people find this part of the treatment a bit too much. They don’t believe that the picture I have taken is really them. Some of them actually walk out,’ laughs the doctor. ‘ The problem is, phone cameras don’t show people as they really are. This camera tells the truth.’ A little bit too much truth, if you ask me.
prager pokes his cursor around an upturned half-moon crevasse above my chin. It looks vaguely Gordon Ramsay-ish. ‘ You have a fatty pad here,’ he says. ‘ We could get rid of that. Do you exercise regularly?’
‘Yes,’ I reply triumphantly, hoping to win some pre-tox brownie points and get more years knocked off. ‘I cycle at least 50 miles a week.’
‘I can see that,’ says prager shaking his head. The more fit men are, the worse they look… the more they look close to death.’ He’s only half-joking.
exercise, prager explains, causes fat to drain from the areas where it is needed and build up in parts of the face where it is ugly and unwelcome.
Injecting fillers helps by creating volume. ‘If you are actively burning fat all over your body, the face also loses fat, especially in the cheek area, making the face look gaunt and tired.
‘look at footballers and professional cyclists — often they age much faster than normal.’
‘How about my eyes and forehead? Shall we start there?’ I suggest.
‘ You want to look like Simon cowell?’ says Dr. prager. ‘I don’t think so. We’d be much better off accentuating your masculinity, which means improving the jawline. let’s try for that George clooney look.’
I nod approvingly and give Dr prager the oK to forget the frown-freeze thing and instead inject some handsomeness into my face.
So which A- list men have had cosmetic surgery then? I ask as the
pre-jab swabbing starts. ‘ Come on… every man in Hollywood, from John Wayne onwards, has had something done,’ says Dr Prager.
What he’s doing for me is lower-face Botox (men require slightly higher doses than women as their muscle mass tends to be greater), adding volume to my jawline where it is sagging.
To locate the problem areas I am asked to grimace comically, relax, then grimace again and repeat, as if watching a gory horror film on a loop.
The doctor jabs me with his needle ten or 12 times targeting the Masseter muscle, used to close the mouth and chew, injecting tiny amounts of Belotero Botox (a thinner product than the most viscous Voluma) to reshape my profile. Deftly applied, small amounts of Botox on both sides will cause loss of mass in this muscle and help improve the shape of the lower face. It doesn’t hurt. I walk out into the Harley Street sunshine fancying that I look younger, more chiselled and ready for my Hollywood close-up.
In truth I won’t see any difference for at least a week. On day seven, I try an exploratory grimace, quickly realising that my face won’t let me do it. It’s a profoundly odd but painless sensation.
Resisting the temptation to manhandle my jawline, fearing that the mass of Botox might shift shape, I wait a fortnight... then decide to bravely ‘out’ myself as a ‘toxer’.
Applying the blokey logic that adding a knockabout prefix to any dubious pleasure completely justifies its indulgence — ‘cheeky curry’, ‘crafty fag’ — I tell a close 51-year-old girlfriend (not a date, of course!) that I’ve treated myself to a ‘naughty bit of Botox’.
She folds her arms and eyes me analytically. Do I look younger? My jaw definitely feels tighter, more defined. ‘Well, you do look a
bit less rumpled,’ she agrees. So less jowly then, and younger?
‘More rested. Healthier,’ she counters, adding more kindly: ‘ That’s what women find attractive, you know. Men who look as though they take care of themselves, not men who look like teenagers.’ I’ll take that.
Now to run the gauntlet of my daughter’s opinion. ‘Do I look like a film star? Ryan Gosling’s dad, maybe?’
My daughter is quietly impressed. She pauses for a moment. In the right light, she tells me, I could easily pass for 49.