A recent article in The Times (read it here) makes for interesting reading regarding ingrained misconceptions of Botox treatments. I'll quote it in full and insert my comments : Thanks to a regular weekend course I am taking, I have spent a lot of time with a group of people, mainly women, in their early thirties. No surprise that their faces are considerably less lined than a 49-year-old’s. But I couldn’t cover up my shock when one of them told me this week that she has regular Botox injections. And a couple more — a woman and a man — said they were thinking about starting.
So I began to look more closely at the 15 or so foreheads in the room. I came to realise, courtesy of those inescapable Botox signatures — an eerie smoothness, a Pledge-like shininess, an apparent expansion of the entire area so as to resemble a grapefruit — that I, among the oldest there, was one of the few whose face has not been injected with a substance made from a toxin produced by the bacterium that causes botulism. My comment would be that the look she describes is plain and simply not true of well administered botox treatments
I am used to being the odd one out. I am a regular on the front row, after all. What I am not used to is being that exception when hanging out with people a generation younger than me. I don’t judge anyone for what they do to their face, and understand the pressures people feel in a society in which age, and the lines that come with it, equates, preposterously, to bad.
Your face is a book that’s there to be read. Erasing your lines erases your story. Nor does doing so make you look younger — just Botoxed. To embark on that at all is, I believe, misplaced. To do so at such a young age, so that by the time you are my age you have lost sight of your true face, strikes me as tragic. And don’t even get me started on the twentysomethings of Love Island.
This week a plastic surgeon chastised his industry for creating a “twisted standard of beauty” in which maximalism is the “new normal”. Yet even the supposedly minimalist approach leads, as the years and the injections and the muscular paralysis tick by, to cookie-cutter faces straight out of The Stepford Wives. As the resolutely unengineered 99-year-old fashion plate Iris Apfel once said: “Some very important people I know have ended up looking like a Picasso.” Naturalness is not just a matter of aesthetics. It’s existential." My comment here would be: What exactly is "natural" ... does natural mean NO PRODUCTS applied to the face or teeth ... eg creams, cleansers, toothpaste? For my more detailed take on "Natural" read my article here.
