Confessions of a Botox addict
At first she feared it. But now, on its 15th anniversary, ALICE HARTDAVIS can’t live without it, as she reveals in this (literally) eye-opening account ...
This week, i’m looking forward to an anniversary. Not my wedding anniversary; this one is different, but still very special. For on Wednesday it will be 15 years since Botox received official approval for cosmetic use, changing the lives — and faces — of millions of women like me.
i’ve been covering the story of Botox from the beginning. i was an early adopter and, after a bumpy start, became a devotee of the way minute doses of botulinum toxin A smooth away wrinkles by damping down the muscles in which they are injected.
it works on a very simple premise — if your muscles can’t contract, the skin above them can’t get scrunched into lines.
since the first practitioners started using it in the UK, i’ve had it injected into ten parts of my face and body, including my forehead, the crow’s feet by my eyes, the ‘bunny lines’ across the nose, my jaw muscles, chin, and the sides of my mouth and two parts of my neck. Oh, and my armpits.
i must have had more than 50 appointments, with at least a dozen doctors, dermatologists, surgeons and nurses, and interviewed scores more experts. i reckon i’ve been injected with more than 2,000 units of the stuff. i couldn’t even begin to calculate how many injections that has equated to.
Botox has been used for decades to reduce muscle spasms in children with cerebral palsy and, in 1989 it was approved as a prescription-only medicine to treat crossed eyes and eyelid spasms. soon doctors and dermatologists began using it to soften wrinkles, though it was all hush-hush initially.
i started hearing about Botox as a beauty journalist in the late Nineties, when the whispers in the gossipy cosmetic world grew about a holy grail of ageing — a jab that could slow the hands of time.
Everyone was intrigued and horrified in equal measure. We would scour celebrity faces to see who’d had their features frozen, wondering why women would resort to a deadly toxin in order to look younger.
‘But botulism can kill you!’ people would shriek when i told them about Botox.
i could understand the fears, but at the same time i was talking to the doctors who used it and to their delighted patients.
All that interest intensified when the U.s. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Botox for cosmetic use in 2002.
The nearest regulatory equivalent to the FDA in the UK, the Medicines and healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MRhA), does not oversee products used for cosmetic purposes, even if those products, as with Botox, are prescription drugs.
SO ThAT FDA approval had enormous influence in Britain. Widespread marketing of Botox for cosmetic use in the U.s. led to a boom in the drug worldwide. soon after the ruling, it became the second most searched medical product on the internet — Viagra being the first.
The drug hit the headlines shortly afterwards when Boots began offering on-the-spot Botox injections in May of that year. My editor at the time tried to make me have Botox at Boots to get the scoop. i refused.
it’s not that i wasn’t tempted — i was 39 — but i was too scared. Plus, my husband was dead against it. it seems my fears echoed the thoughts of the nation. A year later Boots stopped offering Botox, closing down their ‘wellbeing centres’.
it would be two, increasingly wrinkly, years before i finally took the plunge. By then i was 41 with three young children, a full-time career and lines on my forehead that didn’t go away when i relaxed my face.
When my mother told me not to look so worried — when i was thinking happy thoughts — i felt the time had come, and booked in for the jabs at a Kensington clinic recommended by a friend.
i didn’t tell anyone, least of all my husband. i was terribly nervous, worrying about how i would look and how much it would hurt. Friends said it was nothing, it was like bee stings. That’s not nothing, i thought.
The clinic was small. A couple of women were sitting nonchalantly on the sofa, wearing outfits rather smarter than mine.
i joined them and picked up a magazine, but couldn’t concentrate. When i was called in, the doctor was polite but brisk, asking me to frown then raise my eyebrows, and, using a small syringe topped with a small needle, began a series of injections.
There was a tiny crunch each time the needle went in and — ow! — yes, it hurt.
Emerging dazed from the clinic 15 minutes later, i couldn’t believe i’d actually done it.
And then i couldn’t believe i’d left my make-up bag at home, because there were now five red puncture marks across the middle of my forehead. i ducked into the local department store and ransacked their tester tubes of foundation to disguise the damage, then slunk into the office and kept my head down.
Worse, as those injections took effect over the next ten days, they wiped out not just my frown lines but all expression from my forehead. After another week, i couldn’t stand my blank forehead and covered it with a fringe while the effects wore off.
You’d think that experience would put me off — and it did, for a while. But because i was writing about non-surgical procedures, i was constantly offered Botox for free by doctors keen to show off their skills, and, every now and then, would weaken.
sometimes it was great; i would look fresher and less frazzled. But it wasn’t always a success. several doctors in those early years gave me what i call ‘Mr spock eyebrows’, looking pinned down in the middle but flying up at the ends.
AT ONE work event, a beauty editor and fellow Botox experimenter gave me a sharp look and asked if i’d just tried Doctor X’s ‘doe-eye’ Botox, meant to make eyes look wider by injecting the eyelid. i nodded unhappily — i looked less Bambi, more bonkers. As did she.
‘Look, he did it to me, too,’ she confessed and we both collapsed in startled-eye giggles.
We could laugh because we knew in three months we’d be back to normal. The effects of Botox, which interferes with the way nerves work, wear off with time and the muscles go back to working as they did.
Early Botox was not subtle. it was all about what doctors
called ‘chasing the line’, which meant using large doses to get total smoothness, so it often ended up looking ‘frozen’.
There was a terrible kerfuffle in one office where I worked in 2005 when a senior colleague famed for her temper succumbed to the needle. Normally, we would watch her face carefully for signs of displeasure, but suddenly, she began erupting without so much as a frown.
These days, Botox practitioners take a ‘less is more’ approach and the best ones know just how to freshen a face by softening lines and balancing asymmetry for a more natural result.
Whenever I have Botox, I wait until my face is back to normal before I have more, partly to remind myself what I look like without it, and partly because I know these procedures are a slippery slope.
As well as Botox, I also have occasional injections of dermal fillers to pad out my cheeks, my lips and the hollows under my eyes, replacing the volume that vanishes over the years.
I’ve also tried lasers and ultrasound treatments that smooth and tighten the skin. And in the same way, a little bit of all of these is fine, but if you overdo it, you end up looking weird. We all know what pillow-face cheeks and trout-pout lips look like.
I’m also now better at spotting Botox on other people, and have learned it’s impossible to say, ‘You need to see a different doctor,’ without causing offence.
While many friends still fear Botox, I’ve found it to be an ally in the war on ageing. With the high-tech skincare, the facials, the fillers and the lasers, it has given me some control over how I look and that feels good.
I remember remarking to another beauty editor friend, as we cruised through our mid-40s, that I didn’t feel remotely old.
‘And we don’t have to look older, do we?’ she replied. ‘We know the right doctors.’
Now, I’m so used to hopping onto a treatment couch and being stabbed with tiny needles, it is hard to remember what a big deal it was having those first Botox injections.
But then these days I usually only have work done by doctors who I know well and trust.
Over the past 15 years, I’ve met and interviewed the leading lights of the aesthetics industry. I’ve become friends with many of the doctors. I hang out with them at industry conferences, chatting about latest techniques and joking about the ‘Botox Backlash’. (There is no backlash. All those people who swear they’ve given up on Botox? They’re just getting such good, subtle work it’s hard to spot).
These days, I play safe and stick with Dr Tapan Patel, the brilliant aesthetician who heads the Phi Clinic in Harley Street and spends much of his time teaching other doctors how to be better at Botox.
He knows I am not bothered about horizontal lines on my forehead and like to be able to raise my eyebrows, but I do like to soften the pleat of skin that gathers between my eyebrows and relax the laughter lines around my eyes.
He also gives me a few quick shots around the chin, to restrain the muscles that pull down the sides of my mouth.
It takes ten minutes — and the injection marks vanish within half an hour.
So yes, I’m going to go on doing it for another 15 years, and maybe 15 more again. But one thing is for sure — I won’t be a guinea-pig for any inexperienced Botox doctors.
And I won’t be letting anyone inject my eyelids ever again.