www.independent.co.uk
By Richard Hack. May 2018
We have a friend named Slate who looks just like he sounds. Rugged hard body, sun-damaged skin, and jeans faded just so at all the correct places. He’s usually wearing construction boots that are more scruffed than polished. In the old days, he’d be called a “Marboro Man.” These days, as he struts down the sidewalk of Wilton Manors, “stud” works just fine.
So it was quite the surprise to learn by way of invitation that Slate was a “Brotox” guy. (Brotox as in a man who gets botox–the wrinkle relaxer normally associated with women’s spas and plastic surgeons.) This guy with the chiseled body that came direct from Zeus himself had sent out invitations to a Brotox party, not on Mount Olympus but rather at his Harbor Beach estate a few weeks back with botox injections on the menu of hors d’oeuvres.
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, there were 17 million cosmetic procedures performed last year. Most of these were on women, of course. Over the past decade and a half, however, the number of men getting touch-ups has increased to the point that they now account for 3 million of that total. And a lot of those are botox injections.
“Botox is king for men,” says Michigan-based plastic surgeon Dr. Anthony Youn, a regular on The Rachel Ray Show. Dr. Youn knows these things.
Normally, Botox (a shortening of the official name Botulinum Toxin A Type) injections are used to reduce wrinkles in the forehead, crow’s feet around the eyes, thick creases in the neck and frown lines between the eye brows. The injections inhibit muscular nerve signals in order to weaken muscles so they can’t contract, says the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Because there is literally no down time, and injections are invisible, men have been discreetly getting the injections that were previously the purview of women only. The cost of botox is normally between $10 and $15 a unit with a total of 20-40 units needed for men—higher than for women because we have thicker skin.
All of which brings us back to Slate and his Brotox party where treatments were blocked booked at the party rate of $100 an area. No “back room” clinic here. The botox was administered right in his Intracoastal mansion in the library, complete with soft classic music and the collected sonnets of Shakespeare.
It was there that we were also introduced to the new botox treatment called “Scrotox,” injections of botox into the skin of the testicles to give your balls a smoother, larger and lower swagger. Now, truth in advertising, we did not have this procedure done. We have never had any complaints about the size or drape of our healthy scrotums, whose size is already quite a responsibility.
However, that being said, there were multiple candidates for Scrotox that evening last month, and reports of the results, done to the last man, were all glowing. The procedure we’re told in not as painful as it sounds, since the actual testicles are not injected. Rather, the skin around them is numbed and given a few good jolts of the good stuff from the nearby vial.
According to the word on the street, the Scrotox is also now going by the name of “ball ironing,” and is gaining in popularity.
Outside of the occasional Brotox party, there are a multitude of reliable clinics that provide botox injections at reasonable rates. Our favorite: BeWell MedSpa (1881 NE 26th St., Suite 40, Wilton Manors, FL 33305 954-530-5203). Tell them OUTLife Magazine sent you. And mum’s the word.