She has a husband, a public relations business, scrupulous eating habits, and--as she puts it--"a really good body for 33." In what has so far been a full and chaotic life, she has survived a broken marriage and made a happy new one; she has conquered a drug habit that bedeviled her in her 20s and sworn off alcohol.
But nothing continues to betray her like the vertical lines that have etched their way between her brows and into her psyche. She can live with not looking like a model. Her olive skin and almond-shaped eyes give her a slightly exotic-white-girl look, a distinction in L.A.'s sea of prettified faces. What she can't live with are these frown lines.
As she looks up from the chair in her doctor's examining room, you can see the creases that torment her--but just barely.
"Frown," Dr. Andrew Frankel instructs his patient.
In one gloved hand, Frankel, a plastic surgeon, holds a 30-gauge needle, slender as a strand of hair. He studies the lines that form when Kelly Cutrone scrunches up her face. Like a pastry chef dabbing at the sugar flowers on a cake, he pricks the musculature that makes his patient frown. Tiny dots of blood bead up on the surface of her forehead. Frankel swabs them with gauze.
In 10 minutes, Frankel is done, dismissing his patient with the admonition not to exercise that day or lie down for four hours.
Cutrone walks out into the afternoon sunlight, a little pink welt between her brows. "I have to tell you, it's so great," she says. Delight gushes from her voice as the deadliest toxin on the planet creeps through a tiny segment of her forehead. Frankel has just injected Cutrone with Botox.
Frown lines, forehead wrinkles and crow's feet are caused by the constant use of muscles--the ones that purse your forehead, raise your eyebrows and crinkle your eyes when you smile. Derived from the bacterium that causes botulism, Botox temporarily paralyzes the muscles into which it's injected. The paralysis wears off in about four months.
The difference between Botox, the therapeutic treatment, and botulism, the scourge of home preserving, is about 35 vials of the toxin. That's how many Botox vials it would take to give you a 50% chance of dying. Frankel administered a third of a vial to Kelly Cutrone.
