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More Young Women Are Self-Injecting Botox than You Think
Whenever she self-injects Botox, Ashlee Gallop tends to focus mainly on her forehead. The thirty-two-year-old has absolutely no medical training, but that minor detail hardly deters the mother of two.
Botox is a muscle relaxer; it’s used to reduce wrinkles and alter facial musculature. It’s also a prescription drug and controlled substance that should only be administered by a licensed professional—so you would think Gallop would be private about engaging in the practice. Quite the contrary: the beauty influencer regularly demonstrates her self-injection process to her social media followers. In one TikTok video, you can watch her mapping out points on her forehead as she preps for a refresh.
I can’t fathom a thirty-two-year-old having frown lines; but then again, from what I can see through the Zoom camera, Gallop doesn’t have the typically tired look associated with mothers of young children (she has an infant and a toddler). “My natural resting face shows deep forehead wrinkles,” she explains to me from her home in Ocala, Florida, over a video call. “I also address the crow’s feet at the corner of my eyes, and sometimes I’ll do a little ‘lip flip,’ which makes the top lip seem fuller. I’ve done my jawline—they call it the ‘Nefertiti Lift’—but I didn’t get the results I wanted so I don’t think I’ll do that next time.”
Gallop’s Botox journey started out above board. “I first got it done at a medical spa when I was twenty-five,” she says. “I’ve had it done professionally a couple of times. The last time was last year, after I had my second baby.”
It was after that second treatment that she realized that the three-to-four-month refresh—the average timeline when her forehead lines and crow’s feet tend to creep back—wasn’t sustainable. It cost $468 (US), she says. “Life is expensive. Babies are expensive. And then I was like, ‘I wonder if people do this themselves.’” Gallop went down a rabbit hole and found a lot of untrained people were doing their own Botox.
She researched every available source, including TikTok and YouTube videos. “There’s a ton of injectors, med spas, and nurse practitioners that have their own pages on there that will not only film their clients but also give education videos.” Gallop also found articles published by injectors. “I just kind of read everything.”
There was obviously some fear around taking things into her own hands, so Gallop sat with the idea for a full six months before deciding, this past September, to give it a try. A misplaced needle could result in a serious infection, allergic reaction, muscle paralysis, or even respiratory failure. But Gallop reasons that there’s a risk with everything. “I’ve always been like, ‘Okay, we’re just gonna go for it.’” She catches my pained expression and adds: “I know it sounds crazy.”
While it’s hard to document exactly how many people are attempting the procedure at home, it’s clear that social media platforms—and especially video-based apps—have made it easier to share tutorials. “It has recently popped off on TikTok,” Gallop says. “Before that, people were doing it themselves for years, but it wasn’t really talked about.” On Reddit, a community called “DIYaesthetics” includes dozens of threads where members post questions about where to purchase the drug and how and where to administer it (some with photos of their marked-up faces).
Gallop, it seems, is part of a bigger do-it-yourself trend where more and more people—mostly women in their mid-twenties—are bypassing medical clinics altogether and sourcing counterfeit Botox vials online. It’s the only way, they argue, to make the anti-aging procedure more accessible. The fact that it’s illegal to acquire and self-inject in both Canada and the United States—not to mention a major health risk—is a price they’re willing to pay.
When Jean Carruthers first discovered a cosmetic use for Botox—formally, botulinum toxin—back in 1987, she never thought it would become the worldwide beauty phenomenon that it is today.
Dr. Jean, as she is used to being called, was an ophthalmologist at the time. In her office, she was treating people with blepharospasm, a neurological disorder that makes the eyelids repeatedly spasm or forcibly close. Her mentor, Alan B. Scott, basically turned a deadly poison into a miracle drug that relaxed the muscles and prevented the involuntary movements. “These patients couldn’t cross the street, drive a car, or earn a living,” Dr. Jean says, and after the treatment, “they were always so grateful because they couldn’t trust that their eyes would open otherwise.”
At one point, a patient became annoyed with Dr. Jean after her procedure, so she paid extra attention. “You didn’t treat me here,” the patient said, pointing at her medial brow, the inner portion of the eyebrow that’s closest to the nose. Dr. Jean explained that the patient wasn’t spasming there. Yes, the patient agreed, “I’m not spasming here, but every time you treat me there, I get this beautiful, untroubled expression.” This was the “aha” moment, Dr. Jean recalls. Her husband, cosmetic dermatologist Alastair Carruthers, had been struggling to correct frown lines with options like bovine collagen, fat, and fibril, which left the skin thick, stiff, and unnatural looking.
The couple decided to run a study. “Except that, mostly at the time, the reputation of botulinum toxin was as the world’s most poisonous poison,” Dr. Jean says. “So, when you said to one of your patients that you were going to do a study on getting rid of frown lines, and that we could help them with theirs, the response was always: ‘It’s a poison, so I don’t think so.’”
Dr. Jean decided to have herself injected as a way to prove it was safe. “When they saw the difference in the before and after photographs, they were like, ‘Sign me up.’”
Cosmetic Botox was approved by Health Canada in 2001 and by the Food and Drug Administration in the United States the following year. “There was a lot of news media about the approvals, but I think it really started to hit the big time around 2007 because that’s when the iPhone came out.”
Celebrities, particularly women, got in on the trend right from the beginning, says Dr. Jean. “Women’s faces start to age around twenty-four, twenty-five. We get a smaller jaw where everything starts to go down.” For men, the drooping doesn’t start for another two decades—in their mid-forties—so there’s a societal judgment that separates the sexes. “Women will get frown lines, and it’s like, ‘She’s tired; she’s not coping well.’ There’s also ‘resting bitch face,’” Dr. Jean adds dryly.
For men, it’s the opposite. “The lines exemplify him as a leader; that he cares,” she says. “He’s seasoned because he’s experienced.”
Dr. Jean finds the current self-injection fad very frightening. Because DIYers are sourcing Botox online, how can anyone be sure what they’re actually getting? “What’s even in the vial? That’s the number one question.”
She gives the example of British scientific researcher and expert Andy Pickett. Pickett sourced five vials of illicit dermal fillers off the internet. “He analyzed them and found that they had between zero and 280 units of botulinum toxin in them, so you couldn’t tell from just looking at the vial which it was—so you don’t know if you’re getting absolutely nothing or way too much.”
Gallop tells me there are a couple of reliable websites she used, such as AceCosm.com and Celmade.co. “Some people in my comments section have said: ‘I own a med spa, and I also get it from the exact same website because it’s way more affordable.’”
Gallop says she’s never had an issue and that she’s modest about how much she injects into her face. “I’ve gone to injectors; they’re using double the amount that I use. My forehead is twenty-four units in total, but when I was getting it done professionally, it was about forty-something units.”
Lara Devgan, a board-certified plastic and reconstructive surgeon based in New York, dismisses that theory. “Assuming people are injecting actual Botox—which is a huge assumption because you cannot legally purchase Botox, Jeuveau, Dysport, or any other Botox analogs without an active medical licence—you can still have devastating consequences at minuscule doses,” she asserts. “Complications like facial paralysis, eye droop, tissue necrosis, [and] even blindness are, in many cases, irreversible and life altering.”
In 2004, four patients were left paralyzed after an osteopathic physician in Florida injected them with doses that were 2,857 times the estimated lethal amount. “It scared so many people that it killed the legal Botox market for six months,” says Dr. Jean. In 2024, twenty-two people reported adverse effects after receiving counterfeit Botox injections from unlicensed individuals in non-health-care settings. Then in 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three people experienced severe illness requiring hospitalization after self-injecting Botox which was purchased online.
Devgan understands that the trend is born of a normal human desire to present your best self to the world. “But it’s through the lens of some poor decision making,” she says. You also have to be able to “read” a face and know what’s underneath the skin in terms of muscle, Dr. Jean argues. Watching a social media video doesn’t replace the thousands of hours of hands-on training that professionals receive.
I can appreciate how getting a treatment done professionally and sparingly can make people look and feel better about themselves. (I don’t even trust myself to pluck my own eyebrows, so I don’t see myself ever dabbling in DIY injectables). What’s interesting about Botox, though, is that it doesn’t have the same stigma it did twenty-five years ago. Social media has allowed many celebs and beauty influencers to be more transparent about their injections, but it’s also provided ample room for hack culture to take hold.
“The risk is that accessibility without expertise creates a false sense of simplicity,” Devgan says. “Neuromodulators are not commodities: they are powerful biological agents that require anatomic precision, dosing judgment, and restraint. When the context is lost, the procedure is refrained from a medical treatment closer to a consumer good. This is misleading—and at times, unsafe.”
Of course, celebrities have always influenced beauty standards, but what has changed is the subtlety and the sophistication of modern aesthetic work, says Devgan. “The best results today are intentionally invisible. When a public figure looks rested, refined, or simply ‘better,’ it often reflects a combination of excellent skin care, thoughtful interventions, and importantly, good lighting and styling.” But the danger is that observers interpret these outcomes as effortless or purely genetic, she adds. “This can create pressure to replicate them without understanding the process.”
That’s the other downside to the transparency we’re seeing online: the more treatments like Botox become accessible, the more they begin to feel like a necessity. “There’s a behavioural shift that occurs when a scarce, specialized service becomes widely accessible,” says Devgan. “What was once perceived as elective and rare begins to feel normalized and eventually expected.”
But the draw to Botox shouldn’t be stereotyped as vanity, Dr. Jean points out. She tells me that the initial success of the product stemmed from the strategic decision women felt compelled to make in a patriarchal world that is obsessed with the female body. “A lot of them would come in and say, ‘I’m at the height of my powers, but I’m going to get passed over for a part or a promotion if I don’t do something.’ This is the thing: It really helped women.”
Forty years after she made the cosmetic discovery, Dr. Jean continues to practise cosmetic ophthalmology and oculoplastics at her Vancouver clinic. “Cosmetically, there will never be a drug as big as Botox,” she says, a note of pride injected into her voice. “Botulinium and neurotoxins—in the correct doses—have been exquisitely safe in every country in the world. It is truly a generational drug, and it needs to be treated with respect.”
The post More Young Women Are Self-Injecting Botox than You Think first appeared on The Walrus.
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