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Life has recently thrown me the beginnings of a forever frown. It’s this new kink that has turned up uninvited on my forehead. I look permanently exhausted and I’m counting the days until I can have a bit of a helping hand. A helping hand? Yes, you know — a touch of Botox and filler.
This article from The Times is by Sarah Jossel, beauty director at The Sunday Times' Style magazine. She also writes the #BeautyBoss column [read article here]
Oh wait. I forgot. Aren’t we supposed to tiptoe around such words. The B word! The F word! Deny, deny, deny, right? Innocent until proven guilty! I am a failed feminist for undertaking such activity — let alone admitting it to the nation. Or am I? Have things changed a bit? Has the tut-tutting dimmed? And did you perhaps read this while enjoying your Sunday morning cereal without flinching?
Demand for non-invasive cosmetic treatments (that’s anything administered by needles rather than under the knife) has sky-rocketed over the past 12 months. It seems that the stress of lockdown — home schooling, work burnout or maybe just the perpetual unloading and reloading of the dishwasher — has pushed many of us over the edge.
“I’ve seen a huge increase in inquiries,” says Dr Shirin Lakhani, a cosmetic doctor at the Cranley Clinic on Harley Street, London. “Patients have fed back that they feel like they’ve aged at an accelerated rate in lockdown.” Clinics across the country have witnessed a sharp spike that they’ve nicknamed “the Zoom boom” — after too many Zoom calls spent overscrutinising ourselves, we are ready to do something about the resting grouchy faces glaring back at us.
A decade ago, making an inquiry about Botox would have involved illicit calls, private phone numbers (remember 141?) and lots of sneaking around to find out who to see. The cosmetic industry felt seedy and underground. “It was like drinking at lunchtime — no one wanted to admit to it,” says Fiona Golfar, Vogue’s former editor-at-large and co-host of the cosmetic-surgery-themed podcast The Guinea Pig. “I was one of the few to write about having Botox in the 1990s and I became everyone’s ‘secret’ best friend. I used to get calls saying, ‘Don’t say you’ve spoken to me but who shall I see?’ Now women ask openly across the dinner table and in front of their husbands. It’s no longer a naughty secret. We share Botox doctors like we would share our favourite coffee shops.”
So, is the stigma around injectables starting to fade? When beauty and hair salons reopened last month I spotted fellow magazine editors listing their beauty to-do lists on social media: Nails? Tick! Haircut? Tick! Eyebrows? Tick! Botox? Tick! Wait, Botox! Is that where we are now? Does Botox fall into the same camp as having our brows tinted?
If we’re talking about the Kardashians or the Love Island lot, who wear their lip filler and chiselled cheekbones like badges of honour, then, yes, the mood is “loud and proud”. Until recently editors, lawyers, CEOs, politicians and celebrities went to extreme lengths to avoid being exposed. My poor friend told me how she geared up for her first filler experience only to be locked in the bathroom for 20 minutes by her practitioner because a VIP arrived early and demanded that no one else catch sight of her. (She peeked, of course.) I’ve interviewed countless A-list actresses and supermodels for my job and the script remains the same. Me: “Why do you look so radiant?” Them: “A good night’s sleep and lots of water.” Fibs. These days, however, people feel more comfortable sharing. Over the past year the MP Nadine Dorries, 63, TV presenter Cherry Healey, 40, mumager Judy Murray, 61, and beauty editors like me have all felt less ashamed talking about having the odd tweakment.
In fact, on the subject of being more open: let me give you a quick CV of my own tweaks at age 34. (Depending on where you sit on the cosmetic treatment fence, you’ll either think “She’s late to the party!” or “So young, how tragic!” I’ve been on both sides.) I tried Botox and filler for the first time at 32. I was Judgy McJudgy until a fellow beauty editor showed me the before and after pictures of her nose. It was like magic. Pre, there was a prominent bump; post, it was ski-slope smooth. How? She explained that her aesthetician used hyaluronic acid filler to even it out and subtly lift and sharpen the tip. For decades I’ve been self-conscious about my crooked profile but I always viewed the traditional rhinoplasty route as too “permanent”, so her five-star review — “15 minutes, no downtime and it fades back to the original after about nine months” — persuaded me to change lanes.
All preconceived judgments went out of the window and I went off to the Dr Dray clinic in Kensington (note: not the rapper Dr Dre) to meet a dashing Parisian called Benjamin. He eyed up my features, hummed French phrases such as “pas mal” and “très jolie” and then got to work. He gave me Botox in my forehead to soften ze frowning, a touch of filler in my cheeks to “lift them up” and filler in my nose to even out the asymmetric bump.
Since then, I’ve been back twice and I can’t see myself stopping. Each time I instantly look as though I’ve just returned from a sabbatical. A fresh face, full of energy — OK, fine, it’s full of something else, but I’d rather not think about that — and I am more content with what I see in the mirror. The spring is back in my skin but there’s no serious overhaul. It’s just me but better. Also, no one else noticed: my list of tweaks sounds quite extensive and yet the only thing my fiancé asked was: “New earrings?” Even my mum, the person who knows my face best, asked in passing if I’d done something to my brows.
Indeed, although we are starting to talk more openly with colleagues and friends (the cosmeceutical company Teoxane’s Future of Skin Report 2021 found that 60 per cent of people now feel more comfortable sharing), according to Lakhani there is still a sense of shame when it comes to telling our other halves. “I have patients who still get cashback at the supermarket and save it for treatments so that their husbands think it’s being spent on groceries.” I’ve never gone as far as that but I admit that I didn’t want my fiancé to know at first. The subject came up once and it was a flat: “You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
My Style colleagues can relate. We often discuss how our partners are nervous of us looking plastic and frozen — they don’t want someone who has *duh duh duuuh* “Botox”. Dr Wassim Taktouk, who has just opened his own aesthetic clinic in Knightsbridge, believes it’s because things used to be so much more extreme. “Back in the day you only had two choices. You reached a point when you either decided to grow old gracefully or you ‘succumbed’ to drastic plastic surgery where you were pulled and stretched. Nowadays, there is a third option, a middle road — non-surgical tweaks where you can stay true to your complexion. When you understand how the face ages and where the fat depletes, you can rejuvenate the targeted areas that are needed.” In fact, nowadays some of the most popular treatments such as Profilho (dubbed “injectable moisturiser”) aren’t even about altering your features. “I use Profilho to give my clients a round-the-clock, dewy post-facial glow,” Taktouk says.
Why then, if it’s nowhere near as radical as extreme surgery, are the connotations still so negative? “It’s ‘dirty’ because we’ve seen so many bad outcomes,” Taktouk says. Dr Lauren Hamilton, the founder of the Victor & Garth Aesthetics clinic in east London, agrees. “Magazine headlines like ‘Botched Botox jobs’ and ‘10 worst celebrity makeovers’ feed into the narrative that aesthetic procedures are unsafe or unsightly.”
Last month I panicked I would be “Simon Cowelled” if I carried on, when a news story claimed that after years of tweakments he now looks permanently sad. “That’s the problem,” Golfar says, “the faces associated with the movement let the tweakment team down. People think of the horror stories like the Bride of Wildenstein. The conversation has never been, ‘Can I have it and look like Lauren Hutton?’”
The lack of regulations in the aesthetics industry doesn’t help either. “It’s shocking. You or I could legally equip ourselves and start injecting tomorrow,” says Alice Hart-Davis, author of The Tweakments Guide. “That’s why it’s vital to go to someone fully qualified.” Experts unanimously advise researching the clinic and questioning the price of your treatment. Be wary of anything too cheap. “Depending on the area being treated, on average Botox should cost about £200,” Hamilton says. “You are paying a highly skilled professional for their medical expertise.”
One place the tweakment taboo appears to be breaking down is social media. Experts put it down to a generational divide: the under-30s are willing to share because they are adding to their features. “They see it like make-up and the Kardashians are to blame for that,” Golfar says. Whereas the middle-aged woman is seen as “fixing” something. Dr Ahmed El Muntasar, an aesthetic doctor working in Cheshire, Leeds and London, has seen this first-hand: “Women fear they’ll be judged for investing in their looks and appearing vain when at their age they shouldn’t be concerned with such things.”
Trinny Woodall, who has been having Botox since the age of 35 because she hated how her forehead moved on screen, says she is constantly educating women on why cosmetic treatments are there to make you look well, not altered. “When I started it was the 2 per cent talking about it, but now it’s about 50 per cent. Conversations used to be awkward and tongue-tied. ‘You look great! What have you done?’ ‘Oh I got my bone structure from my mother.’ ‘Lovely — try lifting your eyebrows for me?’ Nowadays we discuss it openly on my social media channels.”
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But what happens when the “looking well” wears off after a few months? Does it all become an unhealthy, unsustainable, expensive addiction where we start to feel down about what nature has given us? Lockdown forced some to wean themselves off their beloved Botox.
“What this weird year has done for me is make me feel really comfortable in my skin,” says Style’s beauty columnist India Knight. “I’ve barely looked in the mirror and barely worn make-up, barely been anywhere or seen anyone, and these things have made it very easy to feel entirely relaxed and unanxious about the way I look — or rather, to not even think about it. I’ve found it liberating. So in that context the idea of tweakments felt — and at the moment still feels — like it belonged to another life where you are judged on how smooth or tight or young or taut you look. I look back on that and think, ‘WTF, how absurd, it’s one frown line, who cares?’ But ask me again in six months. I guess never say never. It’s just that at this particular moment in time I really, really don’t see the point. ”
For others, a year like no other has made them think, why not? “I’ve always worried that having tweakments makes me a bad feminist or a bit basic,” says Kate, an editor. “But now I just think, ‘F*** it, life’s too short.’ Do what you want to do — people who judge women for having Botox need to find something better to do with their time, quite frankly.” Can we be feminists and have Botox? Surely the question is: can you be a feminist and judge another woman for choosing what she does and doesn’t want to do with her own body?
Recently we were in the garden and I was showing a friend my new, straighter profile. (No one notices until they see the before.) She told her husband to take a look. “Definitely do it if you’ll feel better about it,” he said calmly. I remember thinking: “We’ve come a long way.” My fiancé now knows too. I said it in passing, like “Just been to the shops”: “Just went to have Botox.” His initial reaction was: “I don’t want it to be a situation where I am with you all the time so I don’t notice you turning into a plastic Barbie doll.” Which I completely understand.
So do I plan to keep going back? I think moderation is the name of my game. The tough conversation comes when you can see someone is taking it too far. Should everyone book in tomorrow? Absolutely not. If it’s not for you, then there’s no shame. But if you are considering it, there’s no need to feel guilty or sheepish. Indeed, it no longer has to be your dirty little secret.
