First, I want to mention that this story isn’t my own experience. I watched a woman share her experience a couple of weeks ago, and I haven’t been able to shake it.
Two weeks out from her second round of Botox, the first woman was sitting in her car, not angry per se but definitely working through some untapped emotion. She’d had her 11s done, her crow’s feet, and something around her chin, and was trying to describe something she hadn’t at all expected.
I think, like so many women, she never wanted a ton done to her face. She wanted to look a little less tired, a little brighter, slightly smoother, and a little more like the version of herself she remembered, and she was super happy after the first appointment. She liked how it made her feel when she looked in the mirror; she said she had a little more confidence taking pictures. All positive. So six months later she went back for a teeny bit more, planning to be done after that.
Then she said the thing that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for the last couple of weeks.
After that second round of Botox, she said she felt like “a prisoner in her own face.”
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How Botox Works
It’s worth slowing down on the mechanism, because most of us have never really been told, and I think it’s been so normalized at this point that many of us aren’t asking the questions we should be asking before booking those appointments.
Botox is botulinum toxin type A, one of the most potent neurotoxins we know of. In cosmetic doses, it’s injected into a specific facial muscle, where it enters the nerve endings and cleaves a protein called SNAP-25. That protein is what allows the little vesicles of acetylcholine to dock and release into the gap between nerve and muscle. Without it, the message to move never arrives. The muscle can’t contract, and you get a temporary flaccid paralysis in that spot.
Which is the whole point: to stop those muscles from moving, and it works exactly as designed. The muscle that creases your forehead stops creasing it. The muscles that create the crow's feet stop creating them. The muscles that make those tiny little bumps on your chin when you talk, react, purse your lips... just don’t do any of those things because the muscle is no longer moving.
The thing is, our facial muscles do so much more than produce your expressions. They’re a vital part of feeding information back to your brain about what you’re feeling, how you’re feeling it, and what you need. Researchers call this the facial feedback hypothesis, and it’s been studied for over a century. When you soften those muscles chemically, you’re not only changing the signal going out. You’re changing the signal coming back in.
But wait, there’s more…
Botox and Emotions In Research
There’s a paper called “Deeper than skin deep: The effect of botulinum toxin-A on emotion processing.” It was published in the journal Toxicon in August 2016 by J.C. Baumeister, G. Papa, and F. Foroni, a team split between the cognitive neuroscience department at SISSA in Trieste and the plastic surgery department at a hospital in the same city. You can read the abstract on PubMed under PMID 27130038, though it’s not that easy to get your hands on as it’s behind a paywall.
The researchers recruited women who were getting facial botulinum toxin injections, and a matched control group who weren’t. Everyone did the same set of tasks twice, once before the treatment and once after. In the study, they had the women rate how emotional two sets of information felt: the first, a series of written sentences; the second, a series of faces showing different expressions. Then they had to classify facial expressions as quickly as they could, under time pressure.
The researchers went in with a specific prediction, and the results largely confirmed it. Very emotional stimuli didn’t change much, and neither did neutral ones. Meaning a screaming face would still be emotionally read as a screaming face, and a neutral sentence would still read as a neutral sentence.
The change showed up in the middle of the range. After treatment, the Botox group rated slightly emotional sentences as less emotional than they had before. They rated slightly happy faces as less happy, and slightly sad faces as less sad. And when they were racing the clock to sort those slight expressions, they were even less accurate. To clarify, the faces they were rating were normal, not faces that had received Botox.
Meaning the women who had received the Botox injections had a harder time perceiving subtle emotion in others.
This also isn’t an isolated finding. Earlier work by Davis and colleagues in 2010 found a reduced emotional response to video clips after Botox compared to controls. Brain imaging studies by Hennenlotter in 2009 and Kim in 2014 found altered amygdala activity when people with treated frown muscles looked at emotional faces. The 2016 paper fits into a body of research that keeps pointing in the same direction.
There are limits to this study; this was a small pilot study in a group of middle-aged women in Italy, not a large placebo-controlled trial. It measured how people responded to images and sentences on a screen, not how they got along with their families. The science here is genuinely more layered than what I’m getting into here. Still, the direction of the finding is consistent, and the emotional side of Botox rarely comes up in consultations before someone books an appointment.
How might the emotional shift after Botox affect our relationships?
“Slightly and subtly emotional” is the whole category that got harder to read for the Botox groups in both studies.
Think about how much of your day lives in that space. If you’re a mother or a caregiver, think about those finite movements across your kid’s face when they say they’re fine and they’re not, or the tiny little tells in expression that you might not even consciously recognize but give you that feeling that something's off, or someone's about to tip, or you need to grab a snack ASAP. Or even in adult, non-caregiver relationships! I think about what my own face might look like for a quick second when I decide not to bring something up, only for my partner to catch it and make me talk it out; or even the small tightening in a friend’s eyes that tells you to ask if they’re okay a second time. Are these all things that become slightly muted?
So much of the emotional information we pick up in a day includes micro-expressions, which are mild and move fast. If the research is telling us that the mild end is exactly where the signal gets fuzzy, that’s not a small thing to consider. Those tiny reads are a huge part of being close and connected to another human being.
And this isn’t even touching on what that woman in her car was sharing about feeling like she was “a prisoner in her own face,” unable to express her emotions. She could no longer make the faces that helped the feelings underneath it move along.
Before booking your first Botox appointment...
It’s natural to want to look healthy, rested and even slightly more youthful…
After all, youthfulness is very much aligned with health and vitality in our minds, even without the incessant anti-aging messaging we’ve had since pre-pubescence. I want to say this clearly, because I don’t think wanting to look brighter is a character flaw.
We’re absorbing anti-aging messaging from every direction. It’s constant. Wanting to look rested and vibrant and like yourself is one of the most human things there is. I’m not here to shame anybody who’s had Botox, and I’m not here to shame anybody who’s thinking about it - you get to do what you want with your body.
It just breaks my heart hearing women who have gone through it find out they weren’t fully informed beforehand. You deserve to know what the mechanism is, what the research has found, and that you have other options.
A Fresh Face AND Emotional Freedom
I want my face to feel like my face, but I also want it to look as beautiful and healthy as possible. Which is exactly why we made the Matcha Eye Corrector.
It’s a tallow-based balm in a glide-on stick, formulated to support the appearance of dark circles, puffiness, and tired-looking eyes. It doubles as a balm for chapped lips and any dry patch on your face. The whole ingredient list is six things:
- Grass-fed Tallow: Its lipid profile closely resembles the composition of our own skin, which is why it absorbs so completely instead of sitting on top. It’s deeply nourishing and filled with vitamins A, D, E + K, as well as essential fatty acids our skin loves.
- Matcha: It’s rich in antioxidants, which support cellular health and a more glowing appearance of our skin.
- Green coffee oil: It contains caffeine, which is why it’s traditionally used to help revitalize skin and reduce the look of puffiness.
- Yarrow: Recognized for its calming, soothing properties on sensitive skin.
- Jasmine. It conditions and softens dry skin, and it smells beautiful.
- Plus beeswax and jojoba oil to hold everything together in a stick that never feels greasy.
The Match Eye Corrector has been one of our best sellers for years, with 31 reviews on the site and 97% of them at five stars. One customer with sensitive skin wrote that after three weeks her eyes looked hydrated and full of life, with none of the clogged pores she gets from conventional eye creams.
Bonus, it won’t make you look or feel as though your emotions have frozen, and it won’t touch a single muscle. You’ll still be able to squint at your kid across the room and pick up on all the normal micro-emotions that tell you something’s up.
Featured In this Blog
Sources
- Baumeister, J.C., Papa, G., & Foroni, F. (2016). Deeper than skin deep: The effect of botulinum toxin-A on emotion processing. Toxicon, 118, 86-90. PubMed
- Davis, J.I., Senghas, A., Brandt, F., & Ochsner, K.N. (2010). The effects of BOTOX injections on emotional experience. Emotion, 10(3), 433-440.
- Hennenlotter, A. et al. (2009). The link between facial feedback and neural activity within central circuitries of emotion. Cerebral Cortex, 19(3), 537-542.
- Lewis, M.B. (2018). The interactions between botulinum-toxin-based facial treatments and embodied emotions. Scientific Reports, 8, 14720.