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"Mom, why do you look mad in every picture from my wedding?" My daughter asked me that at my kitchen table last October. She wasn't being cruel. She had her laptop open and 340 wedding photos in front of her, and she was trying to pick 60 for the album, and she had stopped scrolling. I looked at the screen. She was right. Not mad, exactly. Flat. Smooth and flat and somewhere else. In every single photo my forehead looked like it had been ironed, and my eyes looked like they belonged to a woman standing much further away from her daughter's wedding than I actually was. I remember that day as one of the happiest of my life. You could not find that day anywhere on my face. I should back up. I'm Diane. I'm 47. I live in Westerville, Ohio, with my husband Mark. I've managed the front desk of the same dental office for nineteen years. Our daughter Emily got married in June of last year. She was 25 then, 26 now. And from March of 2023 until January of this year, I got Botox every three months, like clockwork. Eleven visits. $500 each, after tip. I did the math one night and then wished I hadn't. $5,500. Sitting in my forehead. Gone. I want to be fair about this. I didn't start for a silly reason. I started because I looked in the mirror the spring I turned 44 and saw my mother's forehead. Three deep horizontal lines and two little vertical ones between my eyebrows, the kind that make you look annoyed when you're just reading a recipe. The girl at the med spa was lovely. It didn't hurt much. And for about ten weeks at a time, it worked. Smooth forehead. No lines. Compliments. Here is what nobody tells you about those ten weeks. You can't fully raise your eyebrows. You know how your face feels right before a sneeze that doesn't come? That tight, waiting feeling? It was a little like that, all the time, in the top third of my face. At the office I'd watch myself in the little mirror we keep at reception and realize patients couldn't tell when I was smiling at them with my eyes. Because nothing above my cheekbones moved. Mark stopped being able to tell when I was teasing him. He said that to me once, gently, like he was confessing something. "I can't always read you anymore." I told him that was ridiculous. It wasn't ridiculous. And every three months, right around week ten, the tightness would fade and the lines would start creeping back, and I would feel this small, specific panic. Like a lease coming due. So I'd rebook. $500. Smooth again. For three years, that was just my life. It felt like maintenance. Like getting my roots done. Then Emily sat at my kitchen table with 340 photos and asked me why I looked mad at her wedding. We never ordered the album, by the way. She kept saying she was still choosing photos. I knew what she was actually doing. She was waiting for me to stop making that face at the ones of us together. Except I wasn't making a face. That was the problem. I wasn't making any face at all. I went upstairs that night and stood in the bathroom and tried to raise my eyebrows all the way. They went about halfway. I had paid $5,500 for that. My next appointment was already booked, first week of January. I sat on the edge of the tub with my phone and I cancelled it. No plan. No replacement. I just couldn't book the twelfth visit. I'd love to tell you I felt free. I felt free for about five weeks. That's how long the Botox took to fully wear off. Then the lines came back. And I need to be honest with you, because everything I read online had warned me and I still wasn't ready: they came back looking worse than I remembered. Deeper. Like they'd spent three years waiting in the parking lot. The two little vertical ones between my brows were the worst. I looked angry. Actually angry, this time, which was fair, because I was. I typed the med spa's number into my phone twice in February. Twice I sat there with my thumb over the call button. Both times I thought about the wedding photos and put the phone down. But I want to be clear: I wasn't strong, I was stuck. I couldn't go back to the frozen face and I couldn't live with what was in the mirror. There is no version of that story where I win. I just stopped choosing. The night everything changed was a Tuesday in late February. I was in bed, 1 a.m., doing the thing where you type your fears into YouTube. "How to fix forehead wrinkles without Botox." Most of it was garbage. Twelve-step Korean routines. A woman tapping her face with a jade hammer. Serums that cost more than my first car payment. Then a video came up from Dr. Eric Berg, talking about beef tallow for skin. For wrinkles, specifically. Beef tallow. As in, rendered beef fat. On your face. I'm not going to pretend I reacted well. I actually said "absolutely not" out loud, alone, in the dark, like he could hear me. But I didn't scroll away, because he said something that stopped me. He said the fatty acids in tallow are nearly identical to the fatty acids in human skin. The oils your skin makes on its own. Which is why your skin doesn't treat it like a product sitting on top. It absorbs it like it's its own. I sat up and turned on the lamp. Because here's the thing I had never once thought about in three years of injections: Botox never touched my skin. It paralyzed the muscle underneath. That's the entire job. The skin itself, the actual thing that was wrinkled, the thing that had gotten thin and dry and tired at 44, was never given one single ingredient it could use. It just sat there, frozen on top of a numb muscle, aging the whole time. The lines were never a muscle problem. They were a skin problem. My skin was depleted. And I had spent $5,500 renting a way to not look at it. I stayed up until almost 3 reading. Tallow is full of vitamins A, D, E, and K, the fat-soluble ones, the ones skin uses to rebuild collagen. Our great-grandmothers put it on their hands and faces because it was what they had. Then skincare became a industry and we all started buying water thickened with chemicals I can't pronounce, and tallow became something you only heard about from farmers. I fell asleep and in the morning I felt stupid about all of it. Ordering beef fat off the internet to smear on my face. At 47. Because a YouTube video. But the appointment I'd cancelled would have been that week. $500. So I made myself a deal instead, the same deal I'd been quietly making about rebooking: 30 days. I'd try the fat for 30 days. Worst case, I'm out thirty bucks and I go back to the needle, and nobody ever has to know about this phase. I found a small company called Based Supplies that makes a Tallow & Honey Balm. What sold me, honestly, was how un-fancy it was. A little 2-ounce glass jar with a metal lid. Four things in the fragrance-free one: grass-fed tallow, raw honey, beeswax, cold-pressed olive oil. That's the whole label. It was $30 and they have a 30-day money-back guarantee, which matched my deal exactly, so the risk math came out to zero. It arrived in four days. First impression: it looks like a jar of very soft butter and I was scared of it. Second impression: you need way less than you think. A pea-sized amount does my whole face. It goes on like a salve, feels rich for about ten minutes, then just... isn't there. It sinks in. My skin drank it, is the only way I can describe it. I did it every night after washing my face, and mornings under my regular moisturizer days. Week 1: nothing, wrinkle-wise. I'll say that plainly because I hate being lied to about timelines. The lines were all still there. But my skin stopped having that tight, papery, 4 p.m. feeling. Mark's word was "less crepey," which cost him, but he wasn't wrong. Week 2: I was doing my makeup by the window and noticed the two vertical lines between my brows didn't look carved in anymore. Softer at the edges. I decided it was the lighting. Week 3: it was not the lighting. Week 4: I took a photo of my forehead in the bathroom, same spot I'd taken one the day the jar arrived, because I'd promised myself I'd compare on day 30 before deciding about the med spa. I put the two photos side by side and sat down on the toilet lid and stared at my phone for a long time. The lines were still there. I want to be honest: they are lines I have at 47, not gone, not erased. But they were maybe half as deep. The horizontal ones looked like creases now instead of folds. My skin looked like it had been fed. It looked alive. And when I raised my eyebrows, all the way up, easily, like a person reacting to good news, the lines moved with my face and then relaxed again. That's the part Botox could never give me. My forehead wrinkled when I was surprised and smoothed when I wasn't. Like a face. I never rebooked January's appointment. Or any appointment. It's been over six months. There's a folder on my phone now called Face. It has 31 photos in it, every Sunday since February. Emily found it in June when we were at dinner for her first anniversary, because I'm 47 and I hand my phone to my daughter to fix things. She scrolled for a while. Then she looked up and said, "Mom. You look happy in pictures again." Then she posted two of them side by side to her little story thing, after scribbling my face out with the marker tool, because I told her I'd rather die than have the girls at the office see my bare 1 a.m. forehead. If you've seen that photo floating around: hello. The purple scribble is me. We ordered the wedding album in July. Thirteen months late. Emily picked different photos of me than the ones she'd flagged in October. She didn't say why and I didn't ask. Here's where I'm supposed to sell you, so let me do the opposite for a second. I don't know what your skin will do. Mine responded in about four weeks and I know from the reviews that some women see it faster and some need eight or ten weeks, and I assume somebody out there gets nothing, because that's how bodies work. If you have deep, decades-old lines, a $30 jar of fat is not going to do what a needle does in four days. It's slower. It's quieter. It builds. And if you love your Botox and you feel like yourself, genuinely, keep it. This isn't a purity contest. But if you're where I was last October, sitting at a kitchen table looking at a stranger's calm, smooth, absent face in photos of the happiest day of your life, I want you to know the thing I didn't know: Botox freezes the muscle. It never once feeds the skin. The lines are the skin begging for materials, and you can just... give it the materials. The same fatty acids it makes on its own. The vitamins it rebuilds with. That's not a miracle. That's almost embarrassingly simple. $500 every three months is $5.55 a day to be smooth and frozen. The jar I'm on lasts me about three months, which comes out to 33 cents a day to look like myself. I know which woman my daughter wants in the album. They're the Tallow & Honey Balm from Based Supplies. Small family company. They make it in small batches and it sells out, so if it's in stock when you look, that's not fake urgency, that's just their actual speed. There's a scented one and a fragrance-free one (I use the fragrance-free). And the 30-day guarantee is real: if your skin does nothing in a month, email them and you get your $30 back, which is less than the tip I used to leave at the med spa. Make my deal. Thirty days. Worst case, the needle is right where you left it. P.S. Timeline, honestly: week 1 was hydration only, week 2 the edges softened, week 4 was the photo that ended it for me, and around week 6 my eyebrows felt completely mine again. If you try it, take the day-one photo. You will not believe yourself without it. I didn't. P.P.S. Emily and Ryan's album sits on our coffee table now. There's a photo on page 40 of me crying and laughing at the same time during the toasts, forehead completely wrinkled, and it is my favorite picture of myself in ten years. My face was doing six things at once in it. Turns out that was the thing I was paying $500 every three months to prevent.