Should you have Botox to shrink your pores?

Completely smooth skin is beauty’s new obsession. And this pioneering treatment may hold the key

As Dr Joney De souza carefully spears a tiny needle loaded with Botox directly into one of the larger pores on my nose, I flinch and contemplate the mysteries of my job and wonder, not for the first time, whether the world of beauty has gone totally mad.

Injections anywhere on the nose are the worst and these sharp little stabs are making my eyes water.

It has taken an hour of meticulous preparation to get my nose ready for these injections, which are not for wrinkles — but the piece de resistance of Dr De souza’s Pore Patrol, the hot-test treatment for shrinking pores.

Pores? Yes, pores — the tiny open-ings on the skin that let out sweat and sebum, the oil that keeps skin lubri-cated. For the most part, they’re so small you’d never notice them. But thanks to social media, high-definition cameras and an increasing habit of scrutinising our faces for tiny flaws, pores have become the baddest of bad guys on the skincare hit list.

Forget crow’s feet, laughter lines or forehead wrinkles — it’s the tiny pock-marks of blocked pores that could be giving away your age more than anything else.

That’s because pores often enlarge with age. The production of collagen, the supportive protein that keeps skin firm, slows down as we get older and leads to slackening of the skin — including around the pores. They yawn open and are more easily blocked by dead skin, oil and old make-up, so show up all the more.

Judging by the latest slew of pore-reducing beauty products, visible pores must be something we really loathe as a nation.

There are ‘acid toners’ and face masks formulated to clean pores out, sticky strips to rip out the blackheads they harbour, make-up primers designed to fill in the dents in the skin they create and, like super-fine Polyfilla, render the surface flaw-less for a super-smooth, camera-ready finish.

Those with oily skin are more prone to enlarged pores. so if your skin is fine and dry, you may not have a clue what I’m talking about. But if, like me, you have been plagued with large pores since you were a teenager, you’ll know the issues all too well.

excess oil gets caught up in dead skin cells in the pores, then forms what are technically known as ‘comedones’. Finally, the air oxidises these oil plugs and turns them black — et voila, blackheads!

I’ve been waging war on mine for decades, steaming them, squeezing them (tsk tsk!), daub-ing them with clay masks and covering them with make-up, but there seems to be no way of getting rid of them.

so that’s why I find myself in Dr De souza’s clinic. For the past 15 years he has been practising as a cosmetic doctor but he originally trained as a dermatologist.

And recently he has seen an increasing stream of patients — 60 per cent more in the past year — complaining about pores in a way they never used to, and begging him to do something about them.

Before the Botox injections begin, I start with a cleansing and collagen-boosting Pore Patrol treatment. For this I am handed over to Milena Nayde-nov, laser therapist and chief skin whisperer at Dr De souza’s cinic, whose complexion is as immaculate as those of her A- list clients. ‘Do you exfoliate?’ she asks me as she starts clean-ing my face.

‘Well, yeees...’ I say. It’s a bit like protesting to the dental hygienist that yes, I really have been cleaning my teeth dili-gently when the evidence might suggest otherwise.

she paints on a strong, but thankfully non-stinging, solu-