Botox never sounded like a great idea, did it? It works by temporarily paralysing the muscles. It looks good from a distance, but dodgy up close. It is a great favourite among actors, the only professionals on earth, I believe, whose jobs explicitly involve them being able to move their faces as fully as possible. Well, apart from clowns. When you see an actor, photographed off-guard, with a look of shiny, dead neutrality, you somehow know that it is the result of too many injections.

But beyond this instinct, there is the medical fact that it is a poison, injected into the face, and good sense would dictate that this has ramifications. Experience now suggests as much - the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has had reports of 16 fatalities linked to injections of Botox and a similar product.

The problem seems to occur when the botulinum toxin spreads beyond the injection sites to other areas of the body. The reports detailed cases of muscle weakness, difficulty swallowing and aspiration pneumonia, which occurs when you breathe alien material into your lungs. It is true that America is both large and litigious, so while 16 cases is not very many, you can be sure that if it is proved that Botulism was to blame, the drug companies will pay dearly for accidentally offing these wrinklies.

This kind of procedure - which carries no benefit, and appeals to none but the very vain - is never going to attract the most rigorous medics. My half-sister was trained to give Botox injections, on a course that lasted a day, cost GBP120 here in the UK and was full of half-qualified dentists whose medical training doesn’t extend below the thorax. Most proper doctors (no offence) don’t want to get their hands dirty administering poisons for cosmetic reasons.

And when problems do occur, it is reasonable to expect that it would take a skilled physician to notice (one symptom is muscle paralysis: since that’s the purpose of the injection in the first place, you can see why a dentist or layman might miss it).It would be foolish to overstate the danger of the treatment, when the more compelling argument against it is still that it is stupid and it makes you look weird. But still, it is worth bearing in mind that it could also kill you.