Hannah Brown is reconsidering her stance on botulinum toxin injections, particularly Botox. In a video shared on her Instagram Story on Tuesday, May 28, the 29-year-old former Bachelorette expressed her concerns about not wanting her face to appear frozen while also wanting to smooth out a “thick gummy wrinkle” on her forehead.
“I haven’t had Botox in a long time, but I don’t really want to do that much of it,” she told her 2.7 million Instagram followers. “However, why does it just come back here?” she asked the camera, pointing at a wrinkle that appeared when she furrowed her brow.
“I don’t want my face to be frozen because I listened to this one thing about how [kids] connect with people through facial expressions,” she continued. “But now we all have frozen faces, and you don’t know,” she said, explaining this is partly why she “wanted to stop.”
She concluded her discussion on toxin injections by asking her followers, “How do I just get somebody to fix that without freezing my face?” Since she asked this on her Instagram Story, follower responses are not visible, but NewBeauty reached out to New York plastic surgeon Elie Levine, MD, who confirmed it is possible.
“It is understandable that people are leery of using neuromodulators to the point of looking frozen,” he explained. “People still want to be able to be expressive and at the same time limit wrinkles. It is possible for her to treat the ‘gummy wrinkle’ with a neuromodulator and still have function. The goal is to soften the wrinkle and create better, forehead symmetry. A skilled practitioner can strike the right balance.”
This isn’t the first time Brown has spoken publicly about her experience with Botox. In March of last year, during her appearance on the podcast The Checkup with Doctor Mike, she opened up about when and why she got it in the first place. She explained that a former pageant director had once told her at the age of 21 or 22 that her face “looked like a bulldog” when she was expressive during conversations, which ultimately fueled her decision.
The pageant queen then implied that she became Miss Alabama after she stopped getting Botox. “When I was just myself,” she says, she took home the title.
Brown’s willingness to open up about her experience isn’t surprising; she also generously dove into her mental health journey during a sit-down interview with NewBeauty last March. “My mental health journey didn’t start until, gosh, 2020, when I started digging into the weeds of it all,” she told us. “It has been such a process, and it’s changed over time for what I need. I think I’ve grown a lot.
Being on this last show, Special Forces, was unlike other shows I’ve been on. It tested my mental health for sure, but it also proved to me that all the work that I’ve been doing has been working. It’s made me mentally stronger and sharper than I give myself credit for.
From that experience, I feel like I have taken more steps to dig even deeper,” she continued. “That’s changed even with the type of therapy that I’m doing. I’m doing more EMDR, which helps for different PTSD stuff that I need to work on. A lot of that seemed scary before…like, ‘Oh, we don’t want to open that door,’ but now I’m ready to dive in and dig deeper and do the work with connecting with my body and my emotions.”
