Treatment review: armpit Botox (and why I love it)

I know, I know, if there was ever an unnecessary cosmetic procedure, it is surely people like me who don’t have a problem with excessive sweating having their armpits Botoxed just for the convenience of not-sweating. But I tell you, it’s great. 

Not just for wrinkles

What Botox is known for is being able to stop muscles from contracting, by blocking the nerve signals that tell the muscle to work. That’s how it softens ‘dynamic’ lines on the face – the lines that form when we lift our forehead or squeeze our eyebrows together. But injected very superficially, ie just under the skin rather than into the muscles, in the armpit or the hands, it works to block the nerve signals that tell the sweat glands to sweat. So they just don’t sweat.

A life-changer for heavy sweaters

If you ARE someone who suffers with hyperhidrosis, aka excessive sweating, say in the armpits, or the forehead, or the palms of the hands, then being able to stop it, or at least reduce it greatly, can be a lifechanger. I can’t claim to have a problem with sweating but it is just fab to know that your armpits are going to stay reliably dry. And disabling the sweat glands in the armpit isn’t a dangerous or unhealthy thing to do; when the Botox wears off in 3-6 months, the sweat glands start working away like normal, and in the mean time, you have many thousands of other pores through which to sweat. 

It takes minutes, and lasts for months

There’s a video here of me talking this through, and having my armpits botoxed by Dr Bruno Amendola, who charges £600 for the procedure. Dr Amendola  is a great cosmetic doctor who does a lot of this alongside his usual aesthetic work (Patsy Kensit is one of his long-term fans) and as you will see, it is a really quick and pretty well painless procedure (but then I”m a tough old boot who doesn’t mind having a fine needle poked into her armpits. You might feel differently). So yes, after a bit of chat on the video, it does show the needle at work, so if you’re needle-phobic you might want to give it a miss.