A nurse injected one side of her face with Botox in a bizarre experiment to see what the effect would be.
Brittany Krautheim, 41, from Queenstown, Maryland, has been a nurse for 21 years and now works as an aesthetic nurse practitioner.
In recent months, she chose to inject only half of her face with Botox to show what the treatment really does.
She documented the process in a series of TikTok videos that have since racked up millions of views and sparked a heated debate online.
“I wanted to do this series of videos to really educate the general public about what Botox does, what it is capable of, realistic results, and expectations of treatment,” she told Newsweek.
She added: “That way, if people are interested in a treatment like this, they can be well educated and pursue it further if they desire.”
Her most popular clip, which focused on her forehead, has been viewed 2.5 million times.
In it, Krautheim explains how aging skin and declining collagen production lead to wrinkles as facial muscles work harder to lift the skin.
To demonstrate the effect of Botox, she injected her left forehead only, leaving her right brow moving freely and creating lines, while the treated side stayed smooth.
The nurse explained her method in more detail to the Daily Mail. “I injected the entire left side of my face (upper and lower). Areas included the 11s, forehead, crows feet, downturned smile, and platysmal sheath/bands,” she said.
“I stayed true to FDA on label dosing (but half since it was only half my face). Between my brows, I did 10 units, my forehead 10 units, my left eye 12 units, left downturned smile five units, left platysmal bands/sheath 18 units.”
While the procedure might sound extreme, Krautheim insists the difference is subtle.
“I think the biggest misnomer about Botox is that it's going to change how you look,” she explained.
“However, that's not really the goal. Good Botox allows you to keep your normal appearance while subtly reducing facial muscle contractions that cause wrinkles due to repetition. I think the results speak for themselves. I think both sides of my face look ‘natural.’”
She even noted that strangers often wouldn’t have noticed unless she pointed it out.
But she believes if she continued the project long-term, the untreated side would eventually show more pronounced fine lines.
“Over time if I continued this project, let's say over the course of a year, one side of my face would have significantly more set in fine lines and wrinkles because the facial muscles are constantly contracting in the same place,” she said.
Not everything about the experiment has been easy. “It is strange to only have half of your face injected and I will say that around the third week I was getting headaches and having trouble focusing my vision because of the imbalance,” she admitted.
Eventually, she evened things out: “I have injected the other half of my face with Botox,” she told Newsweek. “It did start to feel a bit strange to just have one side of my face hyper animated but it was a great conversation starter.”