What is Botox?

Botox injections, more formally known as injections of the Botulinum Toxin, is actually an injection of the same toxin that causes food poisoning. The Botox injections, however, are sterile and purified. Injecting the toxin into certain muscles can temporarily paralyze the muscles, preventing their ability to contract and cause fine lines and wrinkles, particularly in the facial area. This can occur without causing damage to the muscle tissue.

Are There Side Effects to Botox Injections?

The effects of Botox injections do not last forever, and, to continue having the desired results, multiple injections are usually required approximately every 4-6 months. Side effects are generally minor, and can include headache, nausea, pain at the injection site, and muscle weakness. In rare cases, or cases where inappropriate techniques, untrained administrators, or incorrect dosages were used, drooping eyelids can be seen.

What’s the Best Site for Botox Injection?

The most common sites for Botox injections are in the frown lines of the forehead, but many physicians offer Botox for treatment of other facial and neck wrinkles. Patients can expect to see instant results from injections. Botox is a very effective way for treating those pesky forehead frown lines that can make a person look angry or irritated.

Are Botox Injections More Effective Than Moisturizers?

Using Botox injections as opposed to an anti aging wrinkle cream or an anti aging complex provides more thorough and more visible results. Many creams and moisturizers have very subtle effects and need to be applied very diligently over a long period of time in order to see results. Botox treatment is an alternative that allows people to rid their face of lines and wrinkles more quickly, and for a longer period of time.

Benefits of Using Botox

Many people that are looking for anti aging cosmetic procedures that are affordable, not terribly painful, and very effective will opt for Botox injections. If you are looking to buy Botox injections, you will find that the average Botox injection will cost between $350-500 per site; which is only a drop in the bucket when you compare the cost of a facelift or other cosmetic surgical procedure.

Some practitioners will offer Botox creams or other Botox alternatives, but, according to the Academy of Anti Aging Medicine, these are not found to be as effective as the actual Botox injections. In order to get the desired results, it’s recommended that you have Botox injections as they are intended.

Skin provides the first level of defense to infection, serving not only as a physical barrier, but also as a site for white blood cells to attack invading bacteria and viruses. The immune cells in skin can over-react, however, resulting in inflammatory skin diseases such as atopic dermatitis and psoriasis.

Stress can trigger an outbreak in patients suffering from inflammatory skin conditions. This cross talk between stress perception, which involves the brain, and the skin is mediated the through the “brain-skin connection”. Yet, little is know about the means by which stress aggravates skin diseases.

Researchers lead by Dr. Petra Arck of Charité, University of Medicine Berlin and McMaster University in Canada, hypothesized that stress could exacerbate skin disease by increasing the number of immune cells in the skin. To test this hypothesis, they exposed mice to sound stress. Dr. Arck’s group found that this stress challenge resulted in higher numbers of mature white blood cells in the skin. Furthermore, blocking the function of two proteins that attract immune cells to the skin, LFA-1 and ICAM-1, prevented the stress-induced increase in white blood cells in the skin.

Taken together, these data suggest that stress activates immune cells, which in turn are central in initiating and perpetuating skin diseases. Fostered by the present observation, the goal of future studies in Dr. Arck’s group is to prevent stress-triggered outbreaks of skin diseases by recognizing individuals at risk and identifying immune cells suitable to be targeted in therapeutic interventions.

Source: American Journal of Pathology

In fact, when you see the lengths to which people used to go to make themselves look or smell a little better, it makes Botox look downright rational.

#5.Bird Shit Facials

The Geisha facial is an ancient beauty secret so awesome, it’s been brought back to the present so modern women can experience it. Experience what, you ask? Why, having the shit of a nightingale spackled on their face, of course.

Guanine is a chemical that does wonders for the complexion and poop is a wicked source of it (hence the word guano). How anyone discovered the value of a face smeared in bird poop is unclear, but apparently it’s been around long enough that Japanese kabuki performers and Geisha used to swear by it. And now you too can pay about $180 to have a stranger put shit on your face on purpose. On purpose.

Naturally, bird shit isn’t for everyone. So thank God for ingenuity, as some crafty lady named Diane Irons has assured everyone that kitty litter is pretty much the exact same stuff they’ll put on your face at a regular spa. So really all you need to do to acquire the ingredients for the perfect complexion is train your pet bird to shit in the litter box.

#4. Treating Bad Breath With Charcoal

Fresh breath is a valuable commodity. As any gum commercial will show you, it’s the key to picking up women and not smelling like you just ate the ass out of a dead bear. These things are important. And not just to us, but to our ancestors.

While modern oral hygiene offers many wonderful things like toothpaste with stripes of other toothpaste in it and minty dental floss, back in the day they had to be a little more creative. Sure, fingers and twigs made great toothbrushes, but what was going to remove that colon smell from your food hole? Charcoal, of course.

Ancient Romans were some of the first to use charcoal while other cultures used burnt sticks to help reduce stank, and there is some precedent for that as it will filter odor. In the 1800s, when young ladies were looking to improve their own stink they borrowed this technique and adapted it to simply sucking or chewing lumps of charcoal, leaving them minty fresh and black-toothed.

#3.Curing Baldness With Spanish Fly

Back in the day they didn’t have Propecia which can have bizarre side effects of its own), so what were our forefathers to do? Something stupid as shit? You bet.

One old-school method for hair growth was to rub in a mix of various household ingredients along with nux vomica and cantharides. Not familiar with those last two? They’re usually better known as the poison strychnine, a poison, and Spanish Fly (or cantharidin a less poisonous but still deadly poison that causes priaprism). While it may not have lead to hair growth, at least you’d have horrible spasms and paralysis, possibly with an erection. But if they wanted all that they could just go watch Pokemon.

For those not in the market for something quite so insane, there was also the paraffin wax treatment. Just grab some of this solid form of liquid methane and rub it into the roots and get ready to enjoy long, luxurious Lorenzo Lamas hair. Of course, since this tip was from the early 1900s when open flames were used a bit more liberally than they are today, it would be in your best interests to keep your remarkably flammable head away from everything until that sick mullet grew in.

These fancy and deadly methods were developed to replace the extremely old-school baldness cures, like the one proposed by Pliny back in ancient Rome, that was basically making a tasty salad dressing, then mixing in mouse shit and putting it on your head, which didn’t work, but probably made the average bald man look like a poppy seed bagel from a distance.

#2.Fixing Skin Blemishes With Hallucinogenic Drugs

Because clean and clear skin is pretty much the be all and end all of a shallow person’s existence, there’s really no excuse not to do whatever it takes to achieve that end, even if it means smearing a hallucinogen all over your face.

The Pokitonoff acne treatment recommends mixing some sweet Vaseline with Ergotine to cure those little blemishes, which has to work out for you no matter what happens, as either the pimples go away or you just start absorbing the lysergic acid that exists in Ergotine (ya know, the fun part of LSD) and in no time you’re flashing back to when you did have clean skin, possibly while being chased across a desert by a giant, tooth-filled anus.

If all you’re worried about is freckles, then fear not as you don’t need to trouble yourself with anything dangerous like toxic hallucinogens. Instead, there was lavender freckle lotion, which sounds just lovely. Unfortunately, aside from lavender, it inexplicably included hydrochloric acid, apparently according to the theory that you won’t worry about freckles once your face has melted off, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style.

#1.Skin Bleaching

While today’s fake tan is all the rage for people who want to look like they’re from the Jersey Shore without all the hard work and barbed wire tattooing that requires, back in the day it was the pasty, cave-born, C.H.U.D. look that everyone wanted (because back then, a tan meant you were a filthy, common laborer). The whiter and sicklier, the better. Cracked writers would have been living gods.

But those burdened with some manner of natural huehad to turn to science to help wash the color away. Science in turn tried to murder them by offering up the one-two punch of mercury and arsenic.

Both chemicals were used to make a variety of creams and lotions that could be applied to bleach your complexion, probably because both would be slowly sucking your very soul out through your pores.

Long parodied in popular culture, Botox and the similar drug Myobloc use botulinum toxin to block nerve impulses to muscles, causing them to relax (thereby giving the appearance of smoothed wrinkles). However, Public Citizen reports that in a few cases, the toxin has spread to other parts of the body, resulting in paralysis of respiratory muscles and difficulty swallowing. This can lead to fluids or foods entering the lungs.

Public Citizen’s petition lists 180 reports of adverse effects in the United States from Botox, including 16 deaths. The group points out detailed info on potential side effects is not always given to consumers. They claim a so-called black box warning would make users more aware to seek help if they start to experience early warning signs.

On the same day as Public Citizen’s petition, the New York Times had a review of Charla Krupp’s book How Not to Look Old, running under the headline “Nice Résumé. Have You Considered Botox?”

Krupp, a former editor of Glamour and past guest on Oprah, wrote, “Looking hip is not just about vanity anymore, it’s critical to every woman’s personal and financial survival.” The Times points out, “The book is the latest makeover title to treat the aging of one’s exterior as a disease whose symptoms are to be fought to the death or, at least, mightily camouflaged.”

Krupp told the Times, “I’ll do Botox and Restylane injections, but my motto is, ‘I won’t go under.’ I won’t do anything that involves anesthesia.”

With societal pressure this strong, it’s doubtful even black box labels will discourage many from Botox.

• wrinkle - purse: gather or contract into wrinkles or folds; pucker; “purse ones’s lips”
• wrinkle - make wrinkles or creases on a smooth surface; make a pressed, folded or wrinkled line in; “The dress got wrinkled”; “crease the paper like this to make a crane”
• wrinkle - a slight depression in the smoothness of a surface; “his face has many lines”; “ironing gets rid of most wrinkles”
• wrinkle - furrow: make wrinkled or creased; “furrow one’s brow”
• wrinkle - a minor difficulty; “they finally have the wrinkles pretty well ironed out”
• wrinkle - a clever method of doing something (especially something new and different)

Definition Made by University Princenton

You can often get an idea of how old someone is by looking at his or her face - specifically the skin. As people age, it’s normal to get wrinkles. And if the person has spent a lot of time in the sun, at tanning salons, or smoking cigarettes, he or she might have a lot of them.

The skin is made up of three layers:

• the outermost layer everyone can see, called the epidermis (say: eh-puh-dur-mis)
• the middle layer, called the dermis (say: dur-mis)
• the innermost layer, called the subcutaneous (say: sub-kyoo-tay-nee-us) layer

When a person is young, he or she doesn’t have wrinkles because the skin does a great job of stretching and holding in moisture. The dermis has an elastic quality thanks to fibers called elastin that keep the skin looking and feeling young. A protein in the dermis called collagen (say: ka-luh-jun) also plays a part in preventing wrinkles.

However, over time, the dermis loses both collagen and elastin, so skin gets thinner and has trouble getting enough moisture to the epidermis. The fat in the subcutaneous layer that gives skin a plump appearance also begins to disappear, the epidermis starts to sag, and wrinkles form.

There’s not a magic age (like 40) when everyone suddenly gets wrinkles. Some people in their 20s have little wrinkles around their eyes (called “crow’s feet”) from squinting or spending too much time in the sun.

Other people may be in their 50s or 60s before you can even see a wrinkle. This is usually because they have taken good care of their skin over the years and may have more sebum (say: see-bum), the skin’s natural oil. They may also have “good genes” - which means their family members don’t have many wrinkles. Eventually, however, everyone will have at least a few wrinkles. It’s a natural part of the aging process.

Here are some things people can do to prevent getting many wrinkles at an early age:

• Don’t go to the tanning salon. The UV light from tanning booths is just as damaging as the sun’s - and sometimes worse.
• Don’t smoke! Smoking robs your skin of precious moisture and causes premature (early) wrinkles. (Did you ever notice that most heavy smokers have wrinkles around their mouths?)
• Drink water.
• Moisturize dry skin, especially during months when the air is drier.