Stefanie Schmit decided seven years ago after seeing lines on her forehead that it was time for Botox. She was 35 at the time, and even though she told friends, she ultimately kept her decision from her husband.
“I just felt like I couldn’t justify it,” the marketing executive says. “I’m getting my nails done, my hair done, and then on top of that, I was going to spend $350 every three to four months [on Botox]? That’s a lot of money.”
She also worried that her husband wouldn’t approve. “He already didn’t think I should be coloring my hair. He doesn’t think I need to go to any length to change my appearance, that I’m already perfect,” she says. “While that’s an amazing and beautiful thing, I wanted to do this for me.”
It’s a sentiment shared by a lot of women who increasingly view Botox as a form of self-care, not something they’re doing to appear more desirable to their significant other. Still, Botox remains a complicated issue for many women—while they aren’t necessarily doing Botox to please their partners, they’re fearful of judgment.
Schmit, for one, kept her Botox regimen a secret from her husband for six years. “I’m 5'4", the perfect kitchen height,” she jokes. “Every time I came home with a bruise on my face I just said I ran into a kitchen cabinet.” Financially, she hid the costs by putting it on her personal credit card.
Her husband found out about a year ago, when she came home with an unusual amount of bruising after Botox and felt compelled to tell him. “He told me that I’m beautiful without it, but now that I am on Zoom all day I just feel like I’ve got to keep this up,” she says.
Millions of women get Botox every year. It has been the number one noninvasive cosmetic procedure since 1999—and ever since the pandemic, and the rise of video-calling culture, its use has been on the rise.
An estimated 1.4 million cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures were done in 2021, a 40% increase from 2020, according to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, and a big part of that increase comes from Botox and other fillers, which are becoming more accessible every day.
There are Botox “beauty bars” like Alchemy 43, which has locations across the country that feel closer to a hair salon than a doctor’s office and don’t even require an appointment.
Botox studio Peachy, based in New York City, offers flat-rate pricing—$375 for a consultation and as much filler as needed for the forehead, between the eyebrows, and crow’s-feet area. This has brought transparency to the pricing of filler and opened the procedure to a new legion of women.
Top social media influencers like Christina Najjar—otherwise known as Tinx—talk openly among their followers about getting Botox just as they do about using a new lip gloss.
It’s a strange dichotomy: Why are so many women hiding Botox and filler from their husbands while the stigma around it seems to have evaporated?
Of course, secrecy issues in all kinds of relationships—heterosexual or not—know no bounds, but expectations from stereotypes in straight relationships are longstanding and proving hard to break, particularly when it comes to beauty standards. “There’s this very old-school idea of the mom who never let her husband see her without makeup—even when she was sleeping. These behaviors are all modeled from somewhere,” says relationship expert Elizabeth Overstreet.
This is further complicated by the fixation most heterosexual men have on “natural” beauty, which has has been well-documented in pop culture, from Twitter challenges suggesting that men ask women on swimming dates in order to see their faces without makeup, to Drake’s 2010 hit Best I Ever Had, where he croons about his girlfriend in “Sweatpants, hair tied, chillin’ with no makeup on / That’s when you’re the prettiest, I hope that you don’t take it wrong.”
Even actress Olivia Colman admitted to not telling her husband about getting Botox when she first started. “I didn’t tell [him] and then for about six months he kept saying, ‘Hello, Pretty!’” she told The Times of London in 2015.
“It’s stunning to me that independent women need to use gift cards to hide their derm visits from their husbands,” Ellen Marmur, MD, a New York City dermatologist and founder of MMSkincare, says. “At first, the feminist in me was upset that women were being controlled by their husbands. Given that much of our attraction is to what we see in another person’s facial appearance and expressions—sweetness, kindness, irony, sincerity—perhaps these husbands are saying they don’t want their wife to become another woman. They want to stay married to the woman they fell in love with.”
A 38-year-old model whom we’ll call Amy made the decision not to tell her husband about getting Botox last year, despite being on a text chain with her girlfriends where a regular part of the conversation centers around Botox and other cosmetic procedures.
“He’s the type of husband who won’t notice if I have a chunk of spinach in my teeth, or if my eyebrows have gone crazy,” she says. He had also said that “some of my girlfriends looked really scary [because of Botox]. He had said it many times.”
Amy got it done twice without telling him. After he found her looking in the mirror staring at herself while lifting her eyebrows, she confessed–but then chose not to tell him about subsequent procedures. “I know he would just try to talk me out of it,” she says.
Hairstylist Kristen Keller, 34, got Botox for the first time before her wedding three years ago. After she got the first treatment, “I was so afraid to lie down, I sat up straight up all night,” she says. “But I also felt beautiful. I just couldn’t stop staring at myself.” She still didn’t tell her then fiancé about it, though.
“We had watched Real Housewives, and I remember him saying, ‘Look at their faces, you don’t need any of that.’ I just couldn’t tell him,” she says. She ultimately told him a year later.
Because the stigma around Botox and filler remains prevalent among straight men, they’re inarguably less educated about which injectables do what. There are even Reddit threads dedicated to men dissecting and criticizing women for looking “over-surgerized.” To be clear: Botox reduces the appearance of wrinkles by relaxing muscles in your face, while filler uses hyaluronic acid to add volume in at least nine different spots on your face—not just your lips. If you don’t know much about Botox and filler, it’s easy to make the assumption that overblown lips and a completely frozen face is what all injections lead to, no matter what the type.
Overstreet believes the Botox secrecy is fueled by emotion. “Vulnerability is a key component in a relationship to building an emotional connection, but sometimes we are not comfortable disclosing things we are already insecure about it,” she says—aging being one of them.
“Oftentimes this behavior [of hiding Botox] is traced to something—to how someone grew up, to a feeling that we aren’t enough, or a fear of facing criticism. We all age, that’s a reality, but a lot of people fear facing criticism around those shifts from their partner,” she says.
As Botox has become more accessible, women have become caught in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” mindset—believing they will be judged by their partners if they don’t live up to the Hollywood standard of beauty but will also be judged for choosing an artificial solution to aging. It’s no wonder many women are choosing to not open up a conversation about it with their partners.
Dermatologist Shereene Idriss, MD, known as the @pillowtalkderm on Instagram, sees this secretive behavior among both her male and female patients regularly. “Both men and women at my practice don’t want their significant other to know what they’re doing,” she says. “And it’s not just limited to their significant others. Some people still want to keep it very private. And it’s not just a financial question either.”
To keep the secret, Dr. Idriss has allowed patients to pay in cash or split between credit cards and cash or checks. She’ll also advise on what procedures will have less bruising than others.
“I think social media is much more accepting when it comes to Botox and fillers, but in society as a whole, it is still sometimes frowned upon…. It’s not surprising that the secrecy is still going on,” she says.
For some women, not telling their husbands or boyfriends about their use of Botox has less to do with keeping it a secret and more with feeling they shouldn’t have to tell them.
Public relations executive Ariel Moses, 36, started getting Botox before her wedding six years ago. “I saw it as something I needed to do to take care of myself,” she says. “It’s not a secret, but I don’t tell my husband every time I get a bikini wax or every time I do something run of-the-mill, and I didn’t see this as any different. We have enough to talk about; I don’t have to tell him everything.”
Journalist and PR consultant Nicole Pearl, 44, also thinks it’s her body and her choice. Despite working in the beauty industry for much of her career Pearl didn’t use Botox until the pandemic hit. “Between the pandemic, and kids, and sleepless nights, it started to be on my mind,” she says.
After doing her due diligence and going for a consultation, she went for it—without telling her husband. Pearl ultimately put the experience of getting Botox for the first time on Instagram, and a friend told her husband about it, so it didn’t stay a secret for long.
“I’m not one for hiding things from my partner, and I definitely think if the decision will impact you financially, you need to be aligned with your partner, but in the end, I saw it as my decision to make,” she said.
In the end, Pearl’s husband said he could barely tell she’d had it done. “We put Botox on a pedestal, maybe because we think it’s a gateway to other cosmetic procedures. But dyeing your hair can be even more radical,” she says.
While it’s a common refrain that many men don’t even notice when their significant other gets Botox, Overstreet cautions people to think about the bigger significance of actively keeping a secret. “A lie of any nature is going to start to damage a relationship,” she says, advising that if this is a secret you’ve been keeping from your partner, to get ahead of it to lessen the damage.
“Sit them down and say, ‘Hey, I want to share something I’ve been holding back from you,’ and try to explain and reach a consensus on it.” she says. “Coming forward is going to create the least amount of schism.”
