The Botox Party

Image: Canva

A gaggle of geese. That’s what they immediately reminded me of, and I mean that in the most endearing way. Geese are notoriously feisty, irritable, rowdy and noisy; the worst possible candidates for Botox, so it’s a good thing the FDA recommendation doesn’t extend to their species. This group of feisty, rowdy and noisy ladies were the best possible candidates for Botox especially after the party pills had pacified them, but i’ll get to that.

Veronica, was about to get married. I knew her from University, she was an old friend of mine and an ex-girlfriend of Uchechi’s sister. Uchechi, or Uche as she affectionately calls him, was her husband to be. Uche didn’t know about her stormy entanglement with his sister, he didn’t need to, besides, when she’d been asked to list all her ex-boyfriends for transparency and marital harmony during their pre-marital classes, she did just that, listed the boyfriends…and only the ones she had “dated-dated”; cheeky with the details and lean with the truth. Besides, It didn’t matter now, she’d scratched her ‘same-sex’ itch to satisfaction and far more climax than she ever did with Uche.

The thing is, she came from an orthodox Christian home, so it was inevitable she’d eventually toe the line of afro-religious expectation. She didn’t mind one bit, Uche was a nice guy, a techpreneur who wrote code during the day, and erased it all in frustration at night. He’d been creating an app that for the past 3 years, did everything but work. Yet, his startup had been abundantly funded and widely celebrated as Africa’s next unicorn.

Veronica could never wrap her head around how the tech startup world worked; why there was so much money, but little to no viable product, or why every solution had to be affordable and accessible. Her line of work was more manual and sleeves up than Uche’s. She sold luxury brand clothing, so she could barely pronounce affordable or accessible. The more out of reach and expensive the item was, the bigger her upside.

Uche loved himself some style and luxury, after all, he was a Lagos boy — he wore thick-rimmed reading glasses and thick silver finger jewelry, he rocked silky slim-fit shirts and tailored pants, and you’d never find him with footwear that needed socks. If Usher was Igbo and could code, he’d be Uche. You see, Uche philandered just as much as if not more than he coded. Veronica stepped out generously too, more times than she’d ever admit, but marriage is what would save them, they were both quietly convinced; the demons of deception and deceit would leave them the moment they spoke their vows, and at that moment, she wanted to look her best, so she called me, for a Botox Party.

A Botox Party is literally as the name suggests, a party where a group of people get together and have Botox and dermal fillers professionally administered to them as they celebrate whatever it is they came to celebrate. Why? Because botox is better with besties. The plan was a Botox Brunch for her hen night; all Veronica’s idea.

She’d heard about Botox Brunches on TikTok and knew immediately this was what would light up her party, besides, nobody else was forthcoming with ideas. It was 1 week to her wedding and there’d been no indication that her bridal party was planning anything, she would know if they were. All along, Veronica never had secretly never liked how pedestrian and self-serving her gworls had been through her matrimonial journey. It felt like she’d been pulling them along by their crochet braids when her expectation had been that they’d walk by her side. I’m not sure you could blame them, they each had to put up money just to be in the line-up. Veronica pitched this mandatory ‘monetary gift’ as a bare minimum show of commitment and homage to their years of friendship. Besides, it was going to be the single most instagramable moment of their year and none of them were about to miss out on that over 50,000ksh. Under these conditions, the entitlement and half-assery were to be expected.

They were all skeptical about the botox, all 6 of them, the skepticism died, as soon as Veronica offered to pay for the whole thing. She called me up, I ran the numbers by her, and she ran the numbers by Uche who ran back to me to re-run the numbers. We settled on a date and time, and the botox party was afoot.

They’d commissioned an Airbnb in Karen, the kind with dark colonial history and pale architecture, marketed online as a super-hosted rustic tranquil getaway. It was really nice though; serene, it had to be. Veronica was insistent on curating a cathartic escape from the unrelenting rat race of Nairobi. The gardens were a plush collage of Jacaranda, Bougainvillea, and Hibiscus plants. Soft green Kikuyu grass lawn draped every inch of the land apart from the cobblestone driveway. The compound smelled like horse poop and fresh-cut grass. The house was more of a cottage, I’d be damned if I knew the difference, but Veronica insisted I refer to it as such so that I didn’t ‘cheapen the vibe’ the 500 dollars she was paying a night for. I whispered under my breath that they should be paying us the damn 500 dollars, but today wasn’t the day to agitate for reparations, I had to remain focused.

The parking lot could only fit two cars, so by the time I got there, there were 4 similar-looking hatchbacks snaking down the driveway, so I put myself behind the last car, got out, and walked up the driveway. I found my host at the door chatting up a much younger girl. She looked 20 or thereabout, was tall, lanky, and had a lazy posture. She had on these thick-soled black boots with all manner of flaps on them and distressed black jeans. She wore a large retro athletic jacket and strapped a black Supreme fanny pack across her chest. She had naturally dark lips that were screaming for a ciggy, and these polarized aviator shades on that were hiding a story from the night before. Her thick dreadlocks snaked her back like tropical mangrove. I seemed, to have startled them, because they quickly summarized their conversation and with the slightest of hands, the mysterious girl handed Veronica a little brown envelope, like the ones you get at the pharmacy scribbled with multiplication math.

The mysterious girl fist bumped me as she walked back to the parking lot and hopped on to a nduthi that had just throttled in to pick her up. I hugged Veronica and she walked me to the lounge area where the botox brunch babes were gathered. It was raucous with animated conversation and high-intensity gossip. Now, anyone who knows me knows I need ample time, prayer, and fasting to power up for this degree of concentrated, unfamiliar social interaction; to be me more Bruce Wayne than Batman. I was prepared, optics are important in my line of work. So, I turned on the charm, looking each of these lovely ladies in the eye, sliding in compliments and witty quips as I brutally broke through the ice. It helps, especially when you are planning to repeatedly poke them in the face with Botulinum Toxin.

Botox, or Onabotulinum Toxin A, is an injectable muscle relaxant used to temporarily paralyze muscles at their point of action. Its use extended from reducing facial wrinkles, reducing excessive sweating from the armpits, relaxing chronic muscle spasms, overactive bladders, and chronic migraines to name but a few. When it comes to facial aesthetics, the rationale is simple; facial expression i.e smiling, frowning, etc is coordinated by an orchestra of structurally independent muscles that work together to create an expression. If that particular expression is undesired, for example, frown lines on the forehead, you knock out the muscle by injecting botox into it and the muscle goes limp for anywhere between 6 months to a year. Once the botox wears off, you would usually require a re-touch, to put the muscle back to sleep again, hence the repeat visits. It’s a safe procedure and complications to tend come more as a result of injecting into the wrong muscle. Long-term use, without tapering dosages, could lead to persistent muscle weakness.

There were 5 of them in total, including Veronica. I’d carried enough Botox for 6 because that was the ask. It turns out, that one bridesmaid, Eve, dropped out because she didn’t like Veronica’s best maid, Marie. Eve had offered no tangible reasons other than their blood just never agreed with each other (Kenyan Proverb). There was also something about creative differences when it came to the bridesmaid dresses, wedding theme, flower arrangements, and church selection…they weren’t ‘giving’…or something. Eve also didn’t particularly like Uche; his vibe was off.

I stationed myself on a cute yellow accent chair next to a mahogany coffee table where I promptly set up a little botox buffet. They talked incessantly and punctuated each sentence with either a shrill scream or ‘you can’t be serious’. You could tell they spent a lot of time together, they rotated in pairs from one conversation to the next with ease, it’s like they were speed dating one another. If they weren’t talking to each other they were obsessively posting their Instagram reels, shooting TikToks, or typing and swiping aggressively with the neck of their fingers because their acrylic nails wouldn’t let them use their fingertips.

Now, it was time for the pharmaceuticals, and I don’t mean my botox. I mean the stuff the mysterious young lady had brought. They huddled together in one of the rooms of the cottage but left the door open, so I was able to catch their reflection through a vanity mirror mounted on the corridor wall. Veronica opened the little brown envelope and handed each of the ladies what looked little orange pill. There was some fevered gymnastics that followed as they tried to break the little pills in half, but their acrylics wouldn’t let them use their fingertips. I can only assume that one of them convinced them to swallow the whole thing because they stopped trying and ran out of the room with their faces screwed up as if they’d just chewed through a lemon. They jousted for a sip of Fanta in a pet bottle that was right in front of me, each gulping at it furiously in turn. All of them except Marie, walked out of that room as though nothing had happened.

They changed the music from Afrobeats to deep house and offered me some shots and a beer, but I declined because; ‘optics’. I settled for some coffee instead; I needed to be fully awake for this. Reclining seats would have been perfect for these ladies to sit on while I did my thing. It was an old cottage so by design it didn’t have any modern reclining seats, plus we all know what the colonialists sat on back then; but again, this was not the time to agitate.

The plan was to seat them one after the other on the accent chair and do a thorough facial assessment, treatment mapping, explanation, and administration. At this point their initial angst about the procedure had been tempered, they were also talking in much lower tones, hugging and cuddling each other every chance they could get. It was hard to isolate and separate them to get the work started because they were so intensely entranced in weighty conversation. They were paying me by the hour so I wasn’t fussy. I noticed they took turns going to the toilet, so I’d corner them when they came out and usher them over to the yellow chair. They each took more time in the toilet than I did doing an entire treatment. Notably, they were visibly happier coming out than going in.

With 3 treatments done, I decided to take a break, I’d been asked ‘How’s your heart?’ by all of the first three who each insisted I go into painful detail about my head space and the current tenants of my emotional real estate; ‘emotional what now?’. Mentally exhausted at this point, I walk out to the veranda that lead to the garden, it was getting dark but not dark enough for me to make out Florence and Marie in the corner of the veranda. Veronica had Marie pinned up against the wall, both hands on her hips, face to face with just the width of a thread separating their crimson lips. I have never witnessed a kiss that soft.

I couldn’t make out what they were saying to each, but whatever it was, it was intense, passionate, and had tangible sexual energy. I did however at some point catch Veronica’s glance; she winked at me menacingly, at which point I made the executive decision to take my leave.

Uche wed Veronica a week later in a beautiful quaint lakeside wedding in Nakuru with Marie by her side.

Desire has always and will always struggle to fit into a world that has constructed four walls on the foundation of religion, politics, traditions, and social expectations. Botox is inanimate, it’s a drug, it knows who it’s supposed to be and what it’s supposed to do at all times…unless, it’s used in the wrong dosages or by the wrong person, in which case the effects of its expression would either end catastrophically or open up a whole new world of therapeutic possibilities. Desire is a drug.

The particulars;

Treatment cost: 30,000ksh upwards (dependent on facial assesment needs, and quantity of Botox required)

Who should do it? A Plastic and/or Aesthetic Surgeon

Where should you get it done? https://www.instagram.com/mirazi_ke/