Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Do-it-yourself Botox injections risky business

Do-it-yourself Botox injections are the latest wrinkle in the pursuit of beauty on a budget.

Catherine Maiorino, 54, started thinking about buying Botox over the Internet when the creases between her eyebrows began to needle her. "So I went and found a website where I could order it," recalls the vocational school teacher from Pennsauken, N.J.

She paid $200 to a spa in California for a vial of what was labeled as Dysport, which contains the same active ingredient as Botox. The price was about one-third of what she expected to pay at a physician's office. Maiorino figured her daughter, a phlebotomist, could do the injections. "She is the most excellent sticker in the whole world."

When the substance arrived in the mail, Maiorino was disappointed to find only a few freeze-dried crystals in the vial, to be reconstituted with saline solution.
"There were no actual instructions in the package, no way to determine what the proper consistency should be," she says.

Her daughter balked - "she said I was crazy" - and insisted Maiorino take the vial to a doctor.

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