Face Art

"One of her eyelids sagged, giving her a strange lopsided smile. Distress bubbled up inside me. Had she been struck down with Bell's palsy? Had a stroke? Why didn't she tell me?

'What's happened to your face?' I blurted out, feeling the tears rise in my eyes.

'It's no big deal,' she said, brushing me off with a wave of the hand. 'It's just a bit of Botox gone wrong. It's not permanent or anything.'

It took me a while to fully process her answer. My startlingly confident, formidably intelligent, beautiful 31-year-old friend was getting Botox? And Botox had caused her eye to sag as though she'd had a stroke? Of course, I knew film stars and celebrities forked out in order to have this paralysing poison injected into their faces, but it wasn't something I'd anticipated someone I actually know would do."

--Botox silences women's faces and freezes out empathy