Secret Botox: A betrayal of trust or just a little white lie?
For eight years, Sophia* has been living a double life. She is not cheating on her husband and isn’t doing anything illegal, but her clandestine activities are something she plans with military precision to avoid getting caught.
Sophia, who is in her early 30s and lives in north London, is hiding her secret in plain sight. She is one of the hundreds of thousands of Brits who get non-surgical cosmetic treatments every year and lip filler is her beautifier of choice. But her husband doesn’t know.
Welcome to the world of cosmetic infidelity.
It started with a small amount of filler in her top lip. Then she had to go back to discreetly top it up. Before she knew it, she was hooked. She has a separate bank account, which helps cover her tracks, and she plans appointments around her husband’s football practice. She makes sure they’re first thing in the morning, in the hope the swelling will reduce by the evening. But it’s not always easy to keep it secret.
“It doesn’t matter what time of day you get lip filler, by the evening you look like a baboon’s backside,” she says.
Sophia just needs 24 hours or so for the swelling in her lips to subside, leaving her with a plump but natural-looking pout. But in that tricky transition period? “I get into bed and pretend I have period pains while covering my mouth under the duvet in the dark, with just the TV on.”
Honesty is not an option, she says, as her husband has made it clear he is against cosmetic treatments. “Or so he thinks,” she adds, recalling him telling her how pretty she looked after one procedure. “I think men assume you’ll look over-filled and I can’t be bothered to argue. I’d rather hide it, it’s a lot easier.”
Whether it’s Botox, fillers or other injectables, there are lots of Brits giving their natural beauty a helping hand with “tweakments” – but the majority, according to practitioners, are keeping it secret from their partner or other significant people in their lives. While most people in relationships tell the odd white lie here and there, is hiding the truth about cosmetic work a betrayal of trust – or is it a case of your body, your business?
Justifying the money was one of the reasons given by the secret tweakers we spoke to. Injectables don’t come cheap in a cost of living crisis, with the NHS saying prices vary from about £100 to £350, depending on the clinic and the area being treated.
There’s also societal pressure, especially on women, to look effortlessly wrinkle-free – but do this naturally, please. And so the occasional post-treatment bump or bruise might be blamed on children, pets or cupboard doors – one woman even convinced her husband he had injured her in his sleep.
Once a preserve of the rich and famous, an estimated 900,000 Botox injections are now carried out in the UK each year, according to the government. Skin boosters, which hydrate and add moisture, are also growing in popularity, and a recent report in a British plastic surgery journal predicted the UK injectables market will reach a value of £11.7bn by 2026.
The world is becoming more open about it, with influencers often filming their treatments to show how it all works. Love Island star Zara McDermott and former Made In Chelsea star Millie Mackintosh are among the British influencers who have been open about their injectables.
And yet, for many of those investing in these treatments there is still a stigma attached to it.
Pamela*, a 34-year-old mum from southwest London, has Botox in her forehead and between her eyebrows. For years, she kept it secret from her husband, including when they lived abroad in a country where treatments weren’t always up to scratch.
“Sometimes my husband would look at me like he knew something was different but he couldn’t identify what,” she says. “And these were not good Botox jobs either.” On one occasion, she says she was left looking like Dr Spock. “My eyebrows shot up… it was so bad, an absolute shocker.”
Still, even with vampiric brows, she managed to hide it. Her husband had previously told her she would be wasting money and that she “didn’t need it”. So she always paid cash. “I couldn’t leave a trail,” she explains.
Once after a less successful trip to her injector she was left with bruising so bad that no amount of make-up could cover it up. “I convinced my husband he’d elbowed me in the middle of the night and given me a black eye,” she says. “He felt so bad about it.”
Dr Rina Bajaj, a London-based relationship and counselling psychologist, says honest communication is crucial in any relationship – but individuals also have the right to make choices about their bodies.
“In relationships that value individual freedom and independence, these choices may be seen as personal and not necessarily shared information,” she says. But, in a different kind of relationship, one partner discovering the other has been keeping cosmetic procedures a secret can break trust.”
Understanding the motivations behind the secrecy is important, she adds, as if fear of judgement or negative reactions from a partner is a driving factor, it could be indicative of underlying issues.
But fellow behavioural psychologist and relationship coach Jo Hemmings says keeping small cosmetic procedures secret from a partner is an omission rather than a lie. “It’s not a betrayal of trust because you’re doing it for yourself,” she says. “You’re not deceiving somebody else in the way you would be if you were cheating.”
Even the A-listers are doing it. Oscar-winner Olivia Colman has previously said she tried Botox and “LOVED IT” in an interview with The Times in 2015, but admitted to initially keeping it from her husband. “For about six months he kept saying, ‘Hello, Pretty!’,” she told the newspaper. When she eventually told him, “he found it hilarious”.
Botox and other skin boosters remain a complicated issue for many. For every influencer, beauty journalist or celebrity speaking openly about their cosmetic work, there are more insisting their never-ageing faces are down to the magic formula of drinking lots of water and mindfulness.
Paula*, a 43-year-old mum from Hertfordshire, started getting Botox for her “Gordon Ramsay” frown lines after discovering some friends had been doing it “for years”. After her first treatment, she was nervous her husband would notice, but he didn’t. “I panic every time but he’s not the most observant.”
At the other end of the spectrum, Anna, 40, is open about her Botox and fillers with her husband but doesn’t volunteer the information to friends. “I try not to do the school run for the next couple of days,” she says. “Maybe because I’m a mum, there’s a kind of pressure to dress a certain way and not enhance yourself.”
While practitioners say it is more common for women to keep their treatments hidden, there are a fair few male patients telling white lies about their beauty habits.
Simon*, a 60-year-old man who lives in the home counties, has been with his partner for 24 years. In that time, he has had a cocktail of treatments, including Botox, fillers and BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift), as well as tightening and fat-reducing procedures.
It’s a lot to keep quiet about, but he wants his partner to think his youthful looks are all down to his healthy lifestyle. Is he ever worried about him finding out? “Not at all, blind as a bat.”
But it’s not just his partner he keeps it secret from. “Everyone,” he says. “It all looks so natural and I don’t have giveaway scars round my ears or missing bits of my face. They just think it’s the Peloton and smoothies.”
Euan Mackinnon, a maxillofacial surgeon and aesthetic doctor who treats cosmetic patients at The Lovely Clinic, has been carrying out tweakments for more than 10 years and says about 70% of clients are keeping it secret from someone.
“There’s a lot of people who are worried about being found out by a partner,” he says. It is usually women not wanting their husband or boyfriend discovering their secret, because men will give examples of celebrity horror stories, not realising there are hundreds for whom it has gone well. Men fear their partners looking caricature-like, “with overly inflated lips or frozen foreheads”, he adds. “In reality, that’s not what we do at all.”
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Patients will often tell him excuses they have given for any temporary bruising that might occur immediately after injections. “You do what you’ve got to do to get through those first few days. But most treatments don’t lead to significant bruising.”
On a more serious note, patients are worried about being judged, he says. “Partners might make them feel like they’re being silly or being vain… But you shouldn’t feel shameful if you look in the mirror and you just don’t like something… if there’s a very safe solution to that problem then why not make yourself feel good?”
There are also contradictory societal pressures, he says: age gracefully, but don’t age. “It seems to be a success to look incredibly good and have had nothing done because you’re winning at life, and if you have some help along the way it’s seen by some as cheating or a weakness – which it’s obviously not.”
And there is a difference across generations. Younger millennials have grown up watching influencers filming from their beauty beds as the needles go in, and are more likely to view cosmetic treatments as self-care. Older millennials, Gen X-ers and Boomers are more likely to keep it private.
“But it’s not just a vanity project,” Mr Mackinnon adds. “I’m constantly seeing patients who tell me their confidence has improved – ‘I got this promotion’, ‘I took the plunge with something’ – it can change everything for them.”
Lee Garrett, advanced aesthetic nurse practitioner and prescriber and clinical lead at The Cosmetic Skin Clinic, carries out about 3,000 treatments a year and has more than 20 years’ experience in the field.
He agrees it is common for patients to keep treatments secret from partners, and work colleagues as well – some have even told him that working in a very young environment makes them worry about their looks and being “pushed out by a younger version”.
Secret or no secret, both Mr Mackinnon and Mr Garrett agree the most important thing is to do your research and go to a healthcare professional. “Avoid at all costs people who say they can do it cheap,” says Mr Garrett. “They can, but they are not qualified, not insured and so when it goes badly wrong, you’re on your own.”
And if that happens, the secret definitely will be out.
Meanwhile, Sophia is hoping to get beauty vouchers for Christmas to cover her next lot of secret lip filler. Last time, her husband thought he was gifting her a facial. “He asked me how it went and I responded, ‘really relaxing, thank you!'”
Cosmetic infidelity, it seems, is a hard habit to shake.
*Names have been changed
UK
What women in prison miss most, the prison schemes helping them rebuild their lives and why fewer may end up going to jail
In a workshop in the far corner of the Styal prison estate, glass, plastic and metal are being smashed to the beat of pumping music.
Women at workstations are dismantling electronics with the energy of gym enthusiasts.
TVs and laptops, discarded at local recycling centres across England, have ended up here, on the edge of Wilmslow, Cheshire.
But amid the whiz of drills, the crunch of screens being separated from their plastic casings and the clatter of electronic boards ripped out and chucked in big bins, something else is being recycled – women’s lives.
“You get a lot of frustration out, because obviously a lot of girls have got a lot of anger, you know,” says Joanne*, who is serving time for drug offences.
She has joined this activity not for the £10 per 70 TVs she breaks apart, but because the programme – called Recycling Lives – could give her the skills and the support to keep her out of jail in the future.
Only 12% of women are employed six months after leaving prison, compared to 25% of men. In the general population employment levels between men and women are 78% to 72%.
Ex-prisoners with a job are far less likely to re-offend. So, women prisoners are at a disadvantage. Often a man is connected to the crime they committed.
“For 90% of the women in prison, there’s always a male involved in why they’ve committed crime, it is the case with me as well,” says Joanne, who tells me she was pressured into dealing drugs by her partner.
Official Ministry of Justice statistics say that at least 60% of women in prison are victims of domestic violence and most will have experienced some form of abuse as a child.
Many, too, are mothers and they feel the guilt of separation every day. Joanne says of her son: “It’s my sister picking him up from school, not me.
“It’s my sister there on Christmas day, not me. Birthdays, all the special occasions. It’s heart-breaking.
“People think prison is easy. You are ripped away from your family and your children. It’s not easy.”
As if in illustration, the glass cracks on an iPad, as she peels it away with her screwdriver.
Official figures say there are around 3,500 women in prison and it is estimated that about half are mothers.
‘I’m trying to give them a future’
The workshop manager Yvonne Grime knows this all too well. A former serial offender herself, she’s the first former inmate at Styal to now hold a set of keys to the prison.
“The biggest thing for me [as a prisoner] was leaving my children,” she says, “and I still carry that guilt round, but I have come through it.”
Part of her redemption is to help the women in her workshop. The Recycling Lives programme transformed her life, and she wants to give back.
She says: “I’m trying to give them a future. I’m trying to give you some hope that they can that they can change.
“Get the children back, find a job, find a home. There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Her work is part manager and part mentor. “When I first started, I thought I’m just going to come in and run this workshop,” she said.
“I didn’t realise I had to be their mum, their dad, their brother, their sister, the doctor, the nurse, the everything that comes with it.
“If I had a salary for every one of those professions, I’d be absolutely minted.”
Read more:
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Styal isn’t what you expect a prison to look like.
Inside the high fences and barbed wire are sixteen austere red-brick Victorian houses.
Once an orphanage, they’re now the prison’s accommodation blocks.
Ted the prison cat, wanders from block to block, and has already served several of his nine lives in the compound.
Along with recycling TV sets, women can learn to guide and drive forklift trucks.
They are quick with their tools, spinning through one appliance after another with remarkable and methodical destructive pace.
But the real advantage of the programme is that it continues on the outside. Only 6% of people who go through Recycling Lives go on to commit further crime. The general reoffending rate is 25%.
In a warehouse in Preston, former inmates are involved in recycling food from supermarkets and farms, then sent to foodbanks.
Here we meet Naomi Winter, who – three years since being released from jail – is now a manager at the food distribution depot.
The hardest thing about prison for her too was being separated from a child.
“I was put in prison when my baby is only three months old,” she said.
“So, it was like losing an arm, like losing a piece of my DNA.
“I still woke up for night feeds in the night and stuff like that.”
She says there wasn’t the mental health provision inside of prison to help her deal with post-natal depression, and she spent way too much time alone with her thoughts.
She was in and out of prison for drug offences and violence eight times by the age of 30 and first jailed aged 15, for breaching an anti-social behaviour order (ASBO).
She feels even short prison sentences can ruin lives, and says: “You take women who’s robbed a block of cheese to feed the child.
“They put them in prison for 28 days. They take the home, take the kids, they lose the family, and they get out with nothing. You just create a criminal right there.
“You’ve just created a woman who’s got nothing to lose. You’re also releasing them with a sleeping bag in a tent and telling them to go and sleep in the woods.”
Naomi Winter feels even short prison sentences can ruin women’s lives
Alternatives to custody
The government recognises that prison isn’t working for many of the women who end up there.
It’s why, with women being mostly non-violent offenders and serving short sentences, the government is setting up a Women’s Justice Board to look at reducing the number who go into prison with alternatives such as community sentences and intervention projects tackling the root causes of re-offending.
The Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, told Sky News: “For many women, prison isn’t working. Most women in prisons are victims themselves. Over half are mothers, with a prison sentence separating parent and child.
“That’s why I am establishing a new Women’s Justice Board, tasked with reducing the number of women in prison by exploring alternatives to custody for female offenders.”
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Chief Executive of Recycling Lives, Alasdair Jackson says: “There are certain things we all need as human beings: One is a place to live, one is a job to be able to pay for that place to live and then a support network.
“But there are a lot more factors that women have to contend with; there’s children, there is maybe domestic abuse, there’s everything that goes on around that, but when you give people a chance, when you give people the skills that they need, it is life-changing.
“And when you change a woman’s life, you are often changing the family’s life and the children’s life.”
Alasdair Jackson says ‘when you change a woman’s life, you are often changing the family’s life’
Prison is supposed to be part punishment, part repair job. But there are limited programmes like Recycling Lives, and for many women entering jail currently, the only recycling is back into criminality.
* names have been changed
The world’s oldest man has died at the age of 112, the Guinness World Records has announced.
John Tinniswood was born in Liverpool on 26 August 1912, the year the Titanic sank. He was a lifelong Liverpool FC fan, born just 20 years after the club was founded.
He died on Monday at a care home in Southport, Guinness World Records said.
In a statement, his family said: “His last day was surrounded by music and love.
“John always liked to say thank you. So on his behalf, thanks to all those who cared for him over the years, including his carers at the Hollies Care Home, his GPs, district nurses, occupational therapist and other NHS staff.”
In April 2024, aged 111, he became the world’s oldest living man, following the death of 114-year-old Juan Vicente Perez from Venezuela.
Mr Tinniswood was born in Liverpool on 26 August 1912, the year the Titanic sank. Pic: Guinness World Records
Mr Tinniswood’s key advice for staying healthy was to practice moderation. “If you drink too much or you eat too much or you walk too much; if you do too much of anything, you’re going to suffer eventually.”
But when asked the secret to his longevity after turning 112 in August, Mr Tinniswood put it all down to “just luck”.
“I can’t think of any special secrets I have,” he said. “I was quite active as a youngster, I did a lot of walking.
“Whether that had something to do with it, I don’t know. But to me, I’m no different [to anyone]. No different at all.
“I just take it in my stride like anything else, why I’ve lived that long I have no idea at all.”
Mr Tinniswood was named the world’s oldest man in April this year.
Pic: Guinness World Records
Apart from a portion of battered fish and chips every Friday, Mr Tinniswood did not follow any particular diet, and said earlier this year he felt “no different” turning 112.
“I don’t feel that age, I don’t get excited over it. That’s probably why I’ve reached it.
“I just take it in my stride like anything else, why I’ve lived that long I have no idea at all.”
He lived through both world wars and was a Second World War veteran – having worked in an administrative role for the Army Pay Corps.
In addition to accounts and auditing, his work involved logistical tasks such as locating stranded soldiers and organising food supplies. He went on to work as an accountant for Shell and BP before retiring in 1972.
He met his wife, Blodwen, at a dance in Liverpool. They were together for 44 years before Blodwen died in 1986.
Mr Tinniswood was the oldest surviving male Second World War veteran.
Pic: Guinness World Records
Mr Tinniswood is survived by his daughter Susan, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and lived to be the fourth-oldest British man in recorded history.
His family added: “John had many fine qualities. He was intelligent, decisive, brave, calm in any crisis, talented at maths and a great conversationalist.
“John moved to the Hollies rest home just before his 100th birthday and his kindness and enthusiasm for life were an inspiration to the care home staff and his fellow residents.”
The oldest ever man was Jiroemon Kimura from Japan, who lived to the age of 116 years 54 days and died in 2013.
The world’s oldest living woman, and oldest living person, is Japan’s 116-year-old Tomiko Itooka.
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