Is this what a pickup line sounds like in your 30s?
“Wow, your skin is so nice,” an old college acquaintance told me. “You don’t have wrinkles like some of the other girls.”
Is this really what flirting has come to these days? In my sorority days, a dude would tell me I had a great rack and nice shoes and buy me a shot. Now, at a wedding full of 30-somethings, a guy I haven’t seen since college tells me I’m aging well.
Sure, the compliment made my day ? but as my Champagne buzz kicked in, I had a nagging feeling that there was more to the topic:
Women are obsessed with youthful skin.
Men are obsessed with youthful skin.
Society is obsessed with youthful skin.
And this fixation keeps starting younger and younger…
Preventative Botox
The idea behind “preventative” Botox is that if you get the problem treated early enough, it will keep deep-set, permanent lines away from your face indefinitely.
“I see a lot of twenty-somethings getting Botox treatments, and I truly believe it has a preventative role — but there is usually a specific reason,” says Philadelphia-based Nurse-Practitioner and advanced injector Sarah Sidiqi. “What are some of those reasons? Perhaps someone who squints their eyes all the time, or makes a certain facial expression over and over. Maybe they’re just genetically predisposed to have early signs of aging, or maybe it’s someone who has spent a lot of time in the sun and are already noticing wrinkles and creasing in their skin. The earlier these things can be treated, the better! This allows the patient to take baby-steps now with their skin maintenance, and prevent the need for surgery and more advanced procedures in the future.” When the issues are still small, it is much easier to achieve full correction versus further down the road when the signs of aging may be much worse, and impossible (in addition to being very expensive) to fully correct.
Also, as Sidiqi points out, “as long as [20-something patients] are being treated appropriately and not causing any harm to themselves — people should be able to do anything that will help make them feel better about themselves, and feel better about the way they look.”
When treatments are done correctly, the results should look completely natural and organic to the person’s face. Regardless of the person’s age, Botox treatments shouldn’t be something immediately obvious to other people.
Social Media’s influence on Botox?
Image Source: Instagram user jadeywadey180
Is Instagram part of the Botox-advertising-machine?
There are millions of young people on Instagram, which provides a platform for a ton of beauty-bloggers, makeup-artists, and celebrities to post pictures everyday of their impossibly perfect faces. Their faces look as pristine as that of a doll, smooth and glossy — and their followers are definitely “listening” to what their pictures are saying. (Just consider the huge impact Kylie Jenner had on lip-injection popularity with her plumped-up pout, and she’s only 18 years old!)
In addition to Kylie Jenner (with her 48.6 million followers), there is also Anastasia Beverly Hills (8 million fans), or vlogger Huda Kattan (10.6 million), plus thousands of others. These women all have the same smooth, taut look. Perhaps it’s due to skillful makeup or savvy photoshopping (via apps like Facetune) rather than Botox and dermal-filler injections, but it still sets an extremely high standard of beauty that millions of women are subscribing to.
If injections help these influencers look as perfect as they do, surely they could help the everyday fan — regardless of which chronological decade they fall into. Right?
What’s right for you?
“I strongly believe in preventative skin care from an early age ? especially in the 20s ? because your skin progressively loses collagen from the 20s on, even though all of the aging that is occurring is not yet visible to the naked eye,” says skin expert Naomi Fenlin. “Usually the changes start becoming visible in the mid-30s, so that’s when most people think, ‘Oh. Now I have some wrinkles, this must be the time that I start anti-aging treatments.’ However, if you start earlier you would have put off that moment in time when it seemed like all of a sudden all the signs of aging caught up to you.”
At the end of the day though, you need to be your own decision-maker. What feels right for one person can be completely different for someone else. One of the beautiful things about Botox is that the results are temporary and last approximately 3-months, which allows you to test-drive the effects of various beauty treatments until you find the combination that lets you feel like the best version of yourself.