How to tell your teenage daughter you’re getting Botox

Photograph by Annie Collinge

You’re struggling with your perception of yourself as an empowered woman versus your own vanity. But these are not oppositional, they can work in tandem.

I noticed this with the icons I admired growing up. Was Gloria Steinem “permitted” to make the case for women’s liberation because she was considered so conventionally pretty by white, western standards? Is Julie Christie’s reputation as a Hollywood maverick and activist negated because she had a facelift that she says she elected to do so she could keep getting screen work?

Parsing the ethics of whether or not to begin injectables, let alone how to speak of them, can be misleading. As far as I can tell, almost every middle-aged movie star and model held up as a symbol of how stunning women can look if they’ll just allow themselves to age with grace is a patient of the same doctor in New York. One time I messaged the doctor I favour, Dr David Colbert, to ask how to diminish the smile lines around my mouth now I lived too far away to visit him and he just answered “smize”.

On your question, Dr Colbert’s take is: “If they’re old enough to understand what it really means, then you can tell them. Your 13-year-old would know enough science for you to explain: Botox is an injectable liquid that, if put in the skin near the muscle, makes the muscle not move around.” Personally, I don’t want anything inside me that I can’t quickly get out, and so I steer clear of fillers (at best, some are dissolvable, at worst, they hang about for years). Botox, in contrast, wears off after about four months.

You might want, as a mother of a naturally self-absorbed teen, a secret to keep to yourself. Maybe it’s your Botox. And if you choose the right doctor, you won’t be obliged to say anything, because nobody will know. One irony of the much discussed “Mar-a-Lago face” (the overfilled work of Maga women) is that these are people who admire Trump for his ability to get away with things, yet all have been “caught” by their visible work.

Your daughter may think that Botox, if you tell her, confirms that you believe the two of you are in a beauty competition. I’ll leave you with a childhood memory: I didn’t know Ingrid Bergman was the mother of Isabella Rossellini (or anything about the film my parents were watching) when I asked my mum why the lady in Casablanca was crying. Without missing a beat she answered, “Because she knows she’s going to have a daughter who will grow up to be more beautiful than her.”

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