When L360 editor (and chronic frowner) Mattie Lacey-Davidson booked in for forehead Botox with the hope of a little lift, she was told the treatment doesn’t work on most people.
I’ve dabbled in Botox before but, now I’m in my 30s, I didn’t just want to freeze my face in time — I wanted to change it a little and lift what felt like an increasingly heavy brow and droopy eyelids, which is why I sought out a Botox brow lift.
Much to my dismay, when I went to see Dr Joshua on Harley Street, I discovered that a Botox eyebrow lift could only make a millimetre or two difference — and even that won’t work on everyone.
Here’s what he had to say, and the results I saw (because I asked him to do it anyway) — including before and after photos so you can decide for yourself.
How does forehead Botox usually work?
Botox will be placed at five points across the top of the forehead and at points across the bottom of it, such as just above the eyebrows and in between them. The intention is to relax the muscles that pull down and the muscles that pull up to create equilibrium, reducing movement and softening the area.
You’ll usually have more injections above than below, Dr Joshua tells me, “Otherwise you can’t hold the eyebrows up and they go flat, feel heavy or even come all the way down”.
Exactly where in the forehead is injected for a Botox brow lift?
“What some claim is you can make the bottom muscles of the forehead [that lift the brow] overcompensate by knocking out the top,” Dr Joshua explains. While that sounds good to me, it’s apparently too good to be true. “It’s completely false. There’s no credible evidence of that,” he adds. It will look strange, just create a line across the middle of the forehead I’m told. How does he know? He’s tried it on himself, all in the name of research.
“Botox is a muscle relaxant — you can do a lot with it, but you cannot lift, pull, tighten or anything like that,” he adds.
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Can Botox be used to create ‘fox eyes’?
A slightly unusual recent cosmetic trend has seen people getting aesthetic and surgical procedures to elongate their eyes into more of an almond shape
. I asked Dr Joshua if this was possible with Botox and, once again, he tells me it’s a mis-sold promise.
“This is a very American approach, but what you can do is a very low injection in the middle of forehead and a high one on the outside — or not at all. What that does is push the middle of the eyebrows down and then the ends stay in place or move up. But this is what we call a Spock [from Star Trek] eyebrow. It looks really fake, and people will notice.”
Forehead Botox for frowning and heavy brows
I’ve frowned uncontrollably my whole life. I frown when I concentrate, I frown while I sleep and don’t even talk to me about RBF (resting bitch face) because I should be awarded a gold medal. It’s so chronic that I finish most days with headaches and aching tension across my forehead.
So, while everything Dr Joshua was saying made sense, my concern was that constant frowning was slowly pulling my forehead down and creating persistent tension that was lowering my brow. Surely, if this was true, it could be lifted.
“This is the one area where we can get a result,” he tells me. “If someone has high tension in their frown muscles or around the eye, then the muscle relaxant effect can be powerful. It gives a rested, slightly lifted look — but only in the people who actively pull it down.”
I was delighted to hear this, but he quickly calmed my excitement. “We’re talking millimetres,” he hastens to add, which most people wouldn’t be able to notice — even on themselves.
He examines my face and concludes there’s a tiny bit of tension pulling my forehead down to my eyes, mostly just when I laugh. But, clear as day, my frown muscles had tension, which was keeping the centre of my brows slightly down — this is where I can expect to see a big difference.
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My Botox brow lift before and after results
Two weeks after my appointment with Dr Joshua, I feel refreshed; forehead tension and headaches are a thing of the past, and my brows? They look lifted to me.
I have inspected my before and after photos meticulously, many times, and despite feeling like I can see a difference I think everything Dr Joshua said was right. My brows haven’t lifted as a whole, as I had hoped would be possible. However, in the centre the tension has relaxed and so the middle of my brows is lifted — but simply into the original position. Despite injecting the muscle around my eye responsible for squinting, which contributes to pulling down the tails of the brows, I can’t see a difference here.
While my neither my forehead nor eyes are lifted (you can see there’s no change to my eyelids, which could be affected had the brow lifted), I do think it made a big difference for me. However, the fact is, I was a suitable candidate — my eyebrows haven’t been lifted into a new position but merely reset into the youthful position they once sat in, before years of frowning pulled them down.
