Botox is under fire again with new claims that the anti-wrinkle injections could actually have the opposite effect leaving patients looking older in the long-term.

Botox is now such a popular procedure that some people are using it in their twenties (and, more shockingly, some women are giving their children Botox) to help prevent wrinkles from appearing. However Dr Darren McKeown believes that if Botox injections are started too young, they could actually help speed up the ageing process rather than slow it down.

“There is no evidence that in the long term Botox works as a preventative, nor is there any licence to use it as such,” he writes in the Daily Telegraph. “The drug works on wrinkles by relaxing the muscles responsible for expression lines and is licensed only for the treatment of moderate to severe frown lines.

“Starting Botox treatments at an early age ultimately could do more harm to your looks than good. While [Elizabeth] Taylor was clearly always a beautiful woman from her teens onwards, arguably her looks did not reach their peak until she was in her mid-thirties. Had Botox been available to Taylor in her early twenties, would she ever reached that same level of mature beauty for which she will now always be remembered? I suspect probably not.”

It is not the first time that queries have been raised about the long-term efficacy of Botox last year, we reported that some cosmetic surgeons were starting to note that devotees of the injections were giving themselves extra wrinkles. By freezing certain muscles, others will often start to be used as the body starts to compensate and this will often cause new wrinkles. The most common set of ‘new’ wrinkles are ‘bunny lines’ on the face, so called because if you wrinkle your nose like a bunny, this area of the nose scrunches up.