Botox

Botox has been the reigning, if unofficial, monarch of cosmetic procedures for nearly a decade. But its claim to the beauty throne is being rattled this week by a study in which patients thought another brand of botulinum toxin, the Botox competitor Dysport, smoothed their “crow’s feet” wrinkles a bit better. In a randomized, double-blind face-off funded by the makers of Dysport, patients received injections of Botox on one side of the face and injections of Dysport on the other.

Much of the conversation at a West Hollywood march Saturday was on a subject many would like to avoid: age. About 40 people listened to music and speeches at West Hollywood Park before taking up signs proclaiming, "Make every day a celebration" and "Age is not a number, it's a spirit," and strolling down Santa Monica Boulevard. It was all part of the Age March, a type of event not commonly encountered in the Southern California world of Botox and anti-age remedies. Barbara Rose Brooker started the walk in San Francisco about a year ago, after writing a book called "The Viagra Diaries," about love and sex after 60. Organizers plan to hold marches in New York and Washington, D.C., as well.

Botox-maker Allergan Inc. was ordered by a federal court jury to pay $212 million to a Virginia man who alleged that use of the drug left him severely disabled. The verdict awarded Douglas Ray, 67, $12 million in compensatory damages and $200 million in punitive damages — the largest penalty ever in a Botox injury case. Ray was injected with the drug in 2007 to treat hand tremors. He quickly fell ill with a fever and rash, said his lawyer, Ray Chester. Ray suffered brain damage and now requires round-the-clock care, the lawyer said.

Botox injections can erase the effects of years of emotional expression on a person's face. But the cosmetic procedure that unfurrows brows, smoothes laugh lines and unwrinkles crinkles appears to come with an unseen price: an impaired ability to read others' emotions. A new study has found that when it comes to reading expressions of emotion on the faces of people in photographs, women who received Botox injections in their face were less accurate than those who had their facial lines plumped with an injectable cosmetic filler. The research contributes new evidence to a key theory about communication between humans: that we unconsciously use facial mimicry to help discern and interpret the emotions of others.

Kim Cattrall, 54, plays a former porn star who's the object of a misfit teenager's adoration in "Meet Monica Velour," writer-director Keith Bearden's first feature-length film, which opened Friday. Your character Monica Velour — you're certainly not a former porn star, but you do know what it's like to be a 50-ish performer with a sex-bomb persona. I think there's a difference between sexy and being sexualized, and I think that for me as an actor, I know the difference, but I think the images from the work that you portray, whether it's "Sex and the City" or other films I've done in the past — teen comedies, "Mannequin," "Big Trouble in Little China" — those things sit in people's minds as who you are. The career that I'm having post-"Sex and the City" has been about making different kinds of choices.

In 1960, a young inspector for the Food and Drug Administration faced down a powerful drug company by rejecting its application to sell a morning-sickness drug in the United States. The company, Richardson-Merrell, griped about her repeated demands for more safety data. They complained to her superiors, branding her as a nitpicker. But she stood firm. The drug in question was thalidomide, and worldwide as many as 12,000 children were born with severe birth defects after their mothers used it. In the U.S., where Frances Oldham Kelsey blocked Merrell from distributing the drug except to a few doctors for "experimental" trials, the toll was 17. Thanks to her, the FDA gained a reputation as a vigilant watchdog.

Irvine-based Allergan Inc., which manufactures wrinkle-erasing Botox and the Lap-Band weight-loss system, saw its profit increase 19% in the fourth quarter, but that was still below what some analysts had been expecting. The company said Wednesday that it earned $263.1 million during the last three months of 2010, or 85 cents a share, compared with $221.5 million, or 72 cents, a year earlier. Global sales rose 6.9% to $1.29 billion in the same period. Sales of Botox were up 11%, an increase that Allergan Chief Executive David E.I. Pyott attributed in part to the global economic recovery.

Premiering Sunday on E! (exclamation point theirs), "Bridalplasty" is a series in which, to steal a headline from a network press release, "Brides-to-Be Compete in Wedding-Themed Challenges Collecting Extreme Plastic Surgery Procedures While Trying to Win a Dream Celebrity-Style Wedding. " I'm sure it's all the same to E! whether you are delighted or horrified by this idea, as long as you watch. But I would not encourage it. If you believe that we own our own bodies, it's hard to argue against cosmetic surgery on any sort of moral grounds.

The makers of the miracle toxin that erases frown lines by paralyzing facial muscles won the Food and Drug Administration's blessing on Friday to market Botox for the prevention of chronic migraine headaches. The FDA's decision expands the potential market for Botox, which burst upon the American cosmetic scene in the late 1980s, to 12% of the U.S. population -- the proportion of Americans thought to suffer from the throbbing, pulsating pain of migraine headaches . The agency's approval Friday allows Allergan Inc., which produces a purified version of the botulinum toxin, to advertise to consumers and promote to doctors the use of Botox for chronic migraine, defined as migraine headaches that occur more than 14 days per month.

Allergan Inc., the Irvine maker of anti-wrinkle drug Botox, has agreed to pay the federal government $600 million to settle civil and criminal allegations that it marketed the blockbuster treatment for unapproved uses, the Justice Department said Wednesday. The specialty pharmaceutical firm also agreed to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count of promoting Botox for relief of headaches and other uses for which the drug, made from a form of botulism, is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.