Although botulinum toxin A was first approved in the US in 1989 for the treatment of eye muscle disorders, Botox wasn’t Hollywood-approved to address the ravages of time until around the mid-90s. It was frowned on initially, though naturally not by the celebrities who’d had it, as they could no longer frown. Directors would complain that actors couldn’t properly emote, having disabled half their muscles. It’s a risk, Dr Miriam Adebibe says, as she hovers with a needle over my forehead, ready to give me my first jab, at Victor & Garth, the east London clinic she co-founded with Dr Lauren Hamilton. “If it goes a little bit too far, you start to have a slightly dead look, you smile and there’s a lack of warmth that goes with that. Your facial expressions are not matching how you feel.” I have no personal anxiety at all. Adebibe is a surgeon who left the NHS exhausted by the pandemic and its aftermath. I’ve never had so much anatomical expertise pointed squarely at my face.
By the 00s, the aesthetic treatment was widely available to the general population – dentists could administer it after a daylong course, though it wouldn’t be until 2018 that Superdrug would start offering it. Consumer forecasters were anticipating a million-strong market by 2020, which turned out to be pretty close – by 2021, the estimate was that 900,000 injections were carried out a year in Britain (though some of those will be to the same people).
