There is no Botox Cream

Sorry, there is no Botox cream. There are creams and ointments that claim they are "better than Botox." However, they work by a different mechanism. Botox works by paralyzing the underlying muscles which relax the overlying skin. The creams work by making the area you place them become swollen. The resultant effect is to slightly smooth out wrinkles temporarily (kind of like rehydrating a wrinkled raisin back into a smooth grape).

As far a smoothing out dynamic wrinkles (wrinkles that appear with movement of the face) there is absolutely nothing better than Botox.

David Shafer, MD
Shafer Plastic Surgery
New York City

There are no creams that work like Botox does.

Botox is a protein that relaxes the muscle that causes wrinkling by blocking the communication between the nerve and the muscle. Effectively, the nerve temporarily can't tell the muscle to contract.

There is no substitute for Botox injections. Creams cannot get into the muscle, which is where the product needs to be in order to have any effect.