Last Friday, I got Botox for the first time–or technically, Dysport, a gentler nudge of neurotoxins, what you might call the thinking man's Botox. Before Friday I had never had laser, microneedling, a chemical peel, not even a spa facial. Then a few months ago, and seemingly overnight, a line appeared, a single vertical furrow between my eyebrows. Suddenly I became very aware of foreheads, other people’s and especially my own. I took a dozen forehead-foreward selfies, attempting to figure out what exactly was going on with my face. In June, I went in for a free consultation and left with a business card and the conviction that Botox was something I might do on some far later day. The following month over dinner, Margaret asked me brightly, “Mom, why do you have that line on your forehead?”
The doctor’s assistant photographed me raising my eyebrows as high as I could, and then, knitting them together as deeply as possible. Then the doctor came in to discuss my options. “I want to look very natural,” I said, “and not frozen–but I guess everyone says that.”
“No,” she replied, “some people say they want to look frozen.”
The doctor confided that she uses Dysport herself. She had the most perfect skin I had ever seen.
We took more rounds of photos, and the doctor marked my forehead with little white dots at the proposed injection sites. More photos, and she slightly adjusted the dots. One of my eyebrows is naturally higher than the other and she asked whether I wanted to retain that asymmetry. More than once she commented, “Your forehead muscles are really strong.”
The doctor left to go prepare the injections.
While I waited, I had plenty of time to take in the poster on the wall, a Maslow-style hierarchical pyramid following an aging woman’s gradual ascent into increasingly aggressive cosmetic interventions, from the base (wearing sunscreen) to the top (ripping off your whole face). Another poster showed an attractive middle-aged woman, her photo split vertically into Before and After Botox. After, she looked just as unhappy but a lot less surprised.
Nervous but resolved, I practiced the kind of composure that would soon be imposed on me by two dozen units of AbobotulinumtoxinA. I noticed that I was the kind of person who gets anti-aging treatments. I remembered my sixteen-year-old self saying haughtily that she planned to age gracefully. Surely she was picturing a silver-haired grandmother, I protested, I’m only 44! Like Augustine to the Lord, make me someone who accepts aging, but not yet.
Twelve injections. “Don’t lie down for four hours,” the doctor advised. She suggested I make a lot of exaggerated facial movements over the next few hours, to help the Dysport settle into the muscles of my face, and so I sat in a coffee shop reading critical essays about Piers Plowman while occasionally making expressions of profoundest disapproval and incredulity.
The doctor said I shouldn’t expect to see any results for at least five days, and it was Tuesday night before I became aware that something about my forehead did feel a little different. Last night, six days after my appointment, I lay in bed taking more selfies of my now-weakened forehead.
The results are fine, if subtle. It’s hard to say if anyone else would notice them. Certainly I don’t look “frozen;” my face is still very–some might say excessively–animated. Several times a day I will try to lower my eyebrows like I did in the doctor’s office and find they don’t furrow quite as deeply as they used to, and each time I feel a little dart of panic something like claustrophobia. I feel like I have more freckles than I used to, but I’m probably just noticing them more now because I’m spending a lot more time staring at my forehead.
At sixteen I imagined that old people didn’t care about boys and clothes and trends. Now I’m here and I’m old and I still do very much care–about sex and beauty and fashion and honestly, I’m relieved that I care. I’m glad to be here in this bad world, exchanging scrunchies for hair clips, flirting with pleats, submitting myself to the changing trends in denim, as regular and relentless as the tides. It’s not Botox but my frivolousness that keeps me young.
What I Should Be Doing
Reading Plato’s Ion, reviewing a book on Reformation hermeneutics, (still) getting a paper ready to submit for publication
What I’m Actually Doing
Planning Margaret’s 5th birthday party (the theme is “rainbow unicorn”), tearing all the awful old siding off my lovely old house, neglecting my riotously overgrown vegetable garden, planning this year’s Halloween costume drive (even bigger and better than ever!)
What I’m Reading
After holding out forever, I finally downloaded Libby and Kindle so I can read library books on my phone, and while I still prefer paper, I more than doubled the number of books I usually read in a month; there really is something to be said for having a book in your pocket at all hours of the day.
When I really love something, though, I usually retroactively buy a paper copy to keep, and that’s true for The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker, the collected short observations from the columnist Maeve Brennan, who wrote for Talk of the Town from 1954-1981. A delight.
Also I finally read The Guest and I liked it and I don’t intend to debate it with anyone so don’t even ask.
Also I'm Very Excited About
Fenty’s H.B.I.C. lipstick; the return of the slip dress; the movie Theater Camp; a new season of How To with John Wilson; Annie Ernaux (who isn’t?); my new reMarkable (an anniversary/qualifying exams study present from Zac); back to school, for me and everyone. This is my last semester of coursework in my PhD program, and while I’m impatient to jump into preparing for my qualifying exams, I’m trying to let myself enjoy these last classes, too.
The Fine Print
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