I first got Botox about eight years ago, at a med spa on a busy, ugly stretch of Highway 49 in Placer County, California. On my way there, I read a church marquee’s folksy but intrinsically terrifying warning about the perils of nonbelief in Jesus, and a bumper sticker that claimed “Guns Don’t Kill People Abortion Clinics Do.” Back then, I wasn’t aware of any Botox clinics near my home, in Nevada County, where land acknowledgments are made before art-house movie screenings, and bumper stickers are more likely to quote Mary Oliver or Osho. So close yet so far, Placer County, where Blue Lives Matter meets balayage, felt like the right location to artificially return my fortysomething face to a state of more conventional youthful attractiveness.
Now, in my mid-fifties, the level of torture I put myself through deciding whether to get that initial Botox treatment seems positively adorable. Several women I knew had gone to the same clinic, and I examined their faces to make sure the improvements they’d achieved were subtle yet significant. I interrogated the clinic’s receptionist about my provider’s credentials. I made an appointment three weeks in advance, unsure whether I’d ultimately show up for it. But I did.
The office was like an Airbnb run through a “women love this” A.I. filter—light floors, cream chairs, and textured neutral drapes. With some Fireside Vanilla Spice tea and an Elin Hilderbrand novel I could have curled up in the waiting room for hours. I filled out a form that included a prompt encouraging me to share other things about my face and body that I didn’t like. I crossed out the prompt and wrote, “Please do not ask me about the rest of my face or body because I will cry just do the gd lines pls.”
The practitioner was what I would come to recognize as a Botox nurse out of central casting: blond, thin, with C cups as solid as mixing bowls and enormous matching platinum wedding and engagement bands. Because of whatever she’d done to her own face, she was of indeterminate age. She’d had Botox, yes, but also possibly fillers and that fat-cell-destroying, double-chin-eliminator stuff. We had different aesthetics and probably had totally different tastes in media, friendships, and men. If she had an anti-aging motto, it was “Harness All Available Technologies.” If I had one, it was “Absolutely Do Stuff, but Make Sure It’s Subtle, Because Possibly Worse Than Looking Older Is Looking Desperate to Appear Younger.” The challenge for her, I imagined, was to avoid telling me that smoothing out my forehead was a joke considering that my entire face was in rapid retreat from its glorious past. The challenge for me, if she did say something like this—though of course she would have said it more nicely—would have been not to yell back something like, “Thanks, but I don’t take beauty advice from people with barrel curls.” But what united us was more important than what divided us. We both had been young once, and we both were out there, in modern America, trying to get some respect/dick in our chosen communities.
To her credit, she was restrained in her recommendations. She did ask if I was aware that I had some hyperpigmentation. I laughed and told her about the time my boyfriend’s father interrupted a quiet meal one evening with the abrupt observation, “You have a very dark patch next to your eye, do you know about it?” I said, “Yes, do you know about hormones?” Then we all went on eating.
This anecdote got no reaction. Botox nurses want you to add more expensive procedures, not tell them hilarious true stories. So, I was aware of this hyperpigmentation, she said. Did I want to do anything about it? Yes, of course I did. I wanted to eradicate hyperpigmentation from my face, my body, and the planet. I also wanted each of my breasts to weigh one pound less and be an inch and a half higher up on my chest. I wanted my hair to look like it came from Jimmy’s Sable Coat Emporium instead of Bob’s Discount Carpets. I wanted, roughly eight years from now, to go see “Nosferatu,” and, when the titular character extended his desiccated hand, to whisper to my friend, “Fun fact, I was the hand double for this film,” and for her to reply, “STOP, GIRL, YOU ARE GORGEOUS,” instead of laughing out loud. The nurse injected me. I paid.
Within seven days, my forehead lines were indeed gone, and I looked forty-one or forty-two instead of forty-six or forty-seven, because when you’re that age that’s what good Botox should do. I also felt a deep sadness coming over me like a storm, or, rather, blooming inside me as if I’d been injected with a toxin. I Googled “Botox depression” and found, inevitably, a suspected connection: apparently, since I couldn’t smile right anymore, people weren’t smiling back at me. I resolved never to get Botox again. Exchanging smiles seemed more important than attaining beauty: the thought of a fool.
Years later, I felt the same terrible feeling again and realized that those post-Botox doldrums had really been about relationship issues with my boyfriend. But in that case there was some unexpected good news: I could totally get Botox again.
By that point, I knew about a Botox place in Nevada City. I even knew the owner, because we were former practitioners of the same type of yoga, which fell into some disrepute when its most prominent practitioner was revealed to be a sexual predator. I figured she’d done stuff to her face. I couldn’t place what, but I knew I admired rather than feared her approach. She informed me that, at this point in my aging journey, the lines between my eyebrows were deep, and that she could only do so much, and that—though she was more than happy to lay off on the suggestions—Botox at the corners of my eyes might also be helpful. “Visually,” she added, as if there were another arena in which we could operate together.
So I started getting Botox between my eyebrows, plus a very small amount—O.K., I’m lying, I have no idea if it was a small amount—on my crow’s feet. I’ve been doing this for about three years now. After I fought for a long time to save my relationship, it ended anyway, and I am glad it did. My ex was significantly younger than I am, and he began dating someone his own age. This felt depressing at first, until I started dating someone even younger than my ex. It’s not that I prefer younger men; I really don’t. They’re just the ones who hit on me. In any event, I am sure that my last relationship did not end, and that my new one did not begin, because of the presence or absence of lines on my forehead.
I am generally in what people like to call “a good place.” But this sense of well-being was interrupted not long ago when I was out of town, visiting friends in North Carolina, and realized that my Botox had worn off. It was close to Thanksgiving, a time of year when many people, myself among them, start worrying about being publicly impressive. I needed some more Botox, right away.
“You’ll never be able to get an appointment,” a friend I was staying with told me, after confirming that my Botox was indeed gone. “You might be able to get one at some shitty place where you come out with one eye closed and one eye open. But you don’t want that.”
My friend did not understand what I wanted. I am picky about wine, movies, jewelry, and colorists, but I had started to view Botox the way I have long viewed beer, coffee, and the gynecologist—which is, respectively, if it’s cold, if it wakes me up, and if it can scrape cells off my cervix, then it’s good enough for me. Look, if at some point there were a problem with my cervix, I would try to find a doctor on the cutting edge of women’s health, someone unlike the gynecologist I went to for most of my thirties, who mumbled and smelled of cigarettes and worked out of a dingy building in Los Feliz. Did I not mind having this man’s fingers inside me? I’ve had worse.
