Using Botox Before Wrinkles Form

June 12, 2006 (KUTV) - Can you keep the hands of time at a standstill? In our Healthy Living report Shauna Lake shows us why more young women are using Botox, even though they don't have wrinkles.

Twenty-five-year old art student Robin Marckum has seen the future and doesn't like it.

“My parents have strong wrinkles and it's not attractive,” said Marckum.

Rather than waiting for the inevitable, Robin is being proactive. She's getting Botox injections now.

“It makes it so you are not making the face 800 times a day like this you can't do it,” said Markum.

Traditional Botox treatments are designed to smooth out wrinkles by freezing the muscles that cause them. The idea of giving them to younger people is to prevent the creases from ever getting started.

“If you don't make the movement to create the wrinkle deficit in your face, and you just really never do, then you don't see that line that we know of as the wrinkle in your 40's and 50's.
Last year, women between the ages of 19 and 34 had more than 400 thousand Botox procedures, said Janelle Shubert PhD Woman’s Studies.

Women's studies professor Dr. Janelle Shubert says technology has made many new anti-aging procedures available and the media makes many women feel they must have them.

“Women of all ages are confronted with the picture of the ideal as someone who is an unblemished 17-year-old.”

Dermatologist Dr. Ranella Hirsch says Robin's predisposition to deep wrinkles makes her a good candidate for Botox at her age, but she prefers most young women focus on other things first.

On sunscreen, on keeping healthy on exercising, things that give you good health and in extension good skin,” said Dr. Hirsch.

There are no long term studies that address the safety of continuous Botox use at such a young age.