Banish those wrinkles!
(and no, Botox really isn’t as bad as you think . . .)
IN THE second part of our brilliant series, ALICE HART-DAVIS reveals everything you need to know about the controversial wrinkle-bashing toxin Botox and opens her little black book of tried-and-trusted practitioners.
THe lines and wrinkles that crop up on our foreheads are usually the first indication that we’re not as young as we used to be. There’s no avoiding them — they just happen. If you can happily accept your lines as just part of life, that’s fantastic. If you’d prefer to take active measures to soften them, well, this is where the beauty business gets serious.
There are two reasons those lines arrive. The first is the most obvious one — when you frown or raise your eyebrows, the ‘dynamic’ muscle movements involved scrunch up the skin of the forehead into wrinkles.
Foreheads are expressive, which is great for communicating emotion, but if you carry on making these expressions for long enough, these wrinkles start to become set in.
They’re most noticeable if you have a habit of pulling your eyebrows together when you frown, creating the ‘ 11’ vertical lines, or ‘glabellar lines’, between your brows or if you raise your eyebrows when you’re curious or surprised.
As skin becomes less firm as it ages, these lines become entrenched. This happens because the levels of collagen (the protein that keeps skin firm) and elastin (which keeps its springy) drop the older we get. That makes skin less resilient, so when it is continually squashed into a crease, it loses the ability to spring back.
WHAT AGE SHOULD YOU START?
IT’s ImpossIble to give a one- size-fits-all answer about when to start botox. Cosmetic doctors will usually say: ‘When your face is relaxed and you still see lines on your forehead.’
but it also depends how you feel about those lines. If they make you look cross or sad when you’re not, it’s very irritating. It was when my mother told me not to look so anxious about something trivial that I realised it might be time to do something about my forehead.
skincare, as I explained in yesterday’s supplement, can genuinely help improve the appearance of wrinkles.
The first and most useful skincare product you can own is a moisturising sunscreen, which you must wear every day, even in winter, because what really hastens ageing in the skin is daily exposure to ultraviolet light.
but today we’re talking about procedures. And the main way to quieten lines on the forehead is with injections of wrinklerelaxing toxins, and the most widely used is botox.
botox is considered by cosmetic doctors, dermatologists and cosmetic surgeons to be the gold-standard treatment for softening lines and wrinkles.
It is quick, effective, and lasts for months. It’s also a treatment that makes many people shudder. ‘but it’s poison!’ they say. ‘How could you consider it?’
botulinum toxin A, to give it its proper name, is derived from a nerve poison. And yes, there are lots of badly botoxed faces around, particularly in the beauty industry — and it gives the whole business of aesthetics a bad name.
even though most people have a fairly good idea of what botox does, they usually think it ‘freezes’ the face, removing all expression and making it look distinctively bizarre.
At its worst, botox can leave a blank forehead and eyebrows that are either springing upwards in permanent surprise, or flying up at the outer corners, or pressing down heavily on the eyes.
but honestly, it doesn’t have to be like that. All of the best cosmetic practitioners, who spend more time treating patients with botox than doing any other procedures at their clinics, are appalled by that sort of look.
They would hate for anyone to be able to spot that their regulars even have botox. That’s because their work is cautious and subtle, and every treatment is personalised to suit a patient’s face and their style.
That way, they can make a face look rested, with eyebrows that sit a fraction higher and eyes that look a little more open and less tired than they did before.
most of us have faces that are asymmetrical to some extent, or where the muscles that make expressions pull harder on one side than the other. A spot more botox on the side that is working harder will even things up.