Women are flocking to Botox for a little holiday pick-me-up
All they want for New Year’s is to lose the crow’s feet.
“Around Christmas/New Year’s I get patients come in and ask, ‘What can you do for me, doc?’ ” says Dr. Andres Gantous, a Toronto facial plastic surgeon. ” ‘What can you do for me that doesn’t involve a whole lot of down time?’ ”
Janet, 58, a communications expert who did not want to be identified, would rather spend her money on her face than on a fancy frock.
“I’ve cut back on the great new dress for New Year’s to cover my Botox and filler. Looking fresh and healthy is much more important than that new cocktail dress,” she says. “I’ll pull out something from last year, add a scarf and bling and am good to go.”
Last week, she added some Juvederm filler in her cheeks and Xeomin in her forehead.
“The face is no longer hanging. I love it. I can see a real difference.”
She is one of a legion of women investing their holiday cash on “soft lifts” with fillers such as Restylane, Radiesse and Juvederm or applications of Botox or Xeomin, which may last longer. Botox is a trade name for botulinum toxin type A, which paralyzes facial muscles so furrows and frown lines are temporarily banished.
“The fillers and Botox provide significant improvement without down time,” says Gantous, who is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. “You can start injecting people in their early 30s but filler is usually done in people in their late 30s and 40s when the face starts sagging.”
The soft-tissue fillers can plump up aging lips and camouflage those nasty dark lines or folds of sagging skin around the mouth. The line running from your nose to the corner of your mouth is called the nasal labial fold line and the line running from the corner of your mouth down to the chin or jaw bone is called the marionette line – think of Jack Nicholson as The Joker.
Fillers also plump up the Malar fat pad attached to the cheekbone, which sags to the middle of the cheek as we age.
Botox and Xeomin take anywhere from three to seven days to be fully effective and their effects last three to six months on average.
“The lip plumping and facial fillers are pretty much immediate but results get better within a week,” Gantous says.
“Depending on the type of filler, the effects last six to nine months or up to a year.”
Putting your best face forward for New Year’s is not cheap.
Botox and Xeomin cost $400 to $600 for a standard treatment (forehead and crow’s feet) and fillers range in cost from $350 to $500 per syringe (the average treatment for cheek volumizing is around $1,200, lip plumping $400).
A quick fix to brighten or whiten skin is the fractional laser, SmartXide, priced at around $4,000 for a full face and neck treatment.
“There is a five-day down time,” he says. “It stimulates the formation of collagen and plumps up the skin.”
The bottom line, according to Gantous, is this: “Past 70, you consider facelifts.”
By Rita Zekas December 29, 2009
