About six years ago, a friend looked at my forehead with as much worry as her well-Botoxed brow could muster. Her eyebrows endeavored to meet, like the fingers of Adam and God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, sending ever-so-gentle undulations across her forehead. "What's wrong?" I asked, frowning and no doubt animating the San Andreas-like fault line between my own brows. "You overuse your forehead muscles. Your brow is very active," she told me. "You need Botox."

At 33, this was a first: I had never been accused of hyperactivity. While the rest of my body had long demonstrated a gift for leisure, apparently my histrionic brow had been busy in a compensatory frenzy of activity.

Initially, I decided to reject my "friend's" suggestion. After all, my frown lines and crow's feet had taken decades of smiling and weeping and laughing and stressing to build. "We should be proud that we've survived this long in the world, but on the other hand, we don't need to look dejected and angry when we aren't," says Vancouver-based ophthalmologist and cosmetic surgeon Jean Carruthers, MD, aka the mother of Botox. In the late '80s, she had been using botulinum toxin to treat ophthalmic issues, such as eye spasms, when she happened upon the injectable's smoothing benefits. She's been partaking in her own discovery ever since. "I haven't frowned since 1987," she tells me cheerily over the phone. To Carruthers, the magic of this "penicillin for your self-esteem" is how using it changes people's perceptions of you. "Think about the Greek masks. If you're wearing a sad mask all the time, that's how people read you. Are you an energetic, happy person, or are you a frustrated wretch? If you get rid of that hostile-looking frown, you're not going to look angry and you're not going to look sad. Isn't that better?"

I finally experienced this for myself five years ago, when a couple of married plastic-surgeon friends called me. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, they had an extra vial of bo' they were hoping to polish off, and they asked me to join them—as if it were an invitation to share a bottle of French rosé. It turns out that most of my reservations were financial, because free Botox I did not even try to resist. A week later, the skin on my forehead was as taut and smooth as a Gala apple. Without those fine lines and wrinkles, as Carruthers foretold, I not only looked better, I felt better: As a delightfully unforeseen bonus, the treatment eradicated my tension headaches.

I was also potentially enjoying some long-term antiaging benefits: A 2012 South Korean study concluded that Botox improves the quality of our skin's existing collagen, and peer-reviewed research published in July 2015 by the Journal of the American Medical Association Facial Plastic Surgery revealed that just a single session of Botox improves skin's elasticity in the treated area. "It looks like Botox remodels collagen in a more organized fashion and also spurs the production of new collagen and elastin—the fibers that give skin its recoil, its bounce and buoyancy," says NYC-based dermatologist Robert Anolik, who notes that the benefits are cumulative. "We're still trying to figure out the how and the why." Botox also may improve overall skin texture by impeding oil production. "It's believed that Botox can trigger a reduction in the size of the oil gland. As a consequence, the skin may look smoother and pores should look smaller," Anolik says. Another theory gaining traction in academic circles: "Botox might serve as an antioxidant, preventing inflammatory damage on the surrounding collagen and elastin."

I definitely was a return customer, visiting my derm for the occasional top-up. Then last year I got pregnant and had to stop cold turkey. (Allergan, the maker of Botox, recommends that pregnant or breastfeeding mothers avoid the use of neurotoxins.) Despite Botox's potential preventative powers, I'm sorry to report that those once-slumbering dynamic lines and wrinkles, the ones not even a natural disaster could have summoned into action, made an aggressive comeback. Still nursing, and with time—and REM sleep—in short supply, I decided to look for the next best thing, testing an assortment of topicals, products, and devices, a sort of alt-tox regimen.

To be clear: There isn't anything that can effectively target the dynamic facial lines (those activated by movement) and inhibit facial muscle activity like an injectable neurotoxin. But that by no means dissuades skin-care brands from marketing products claiming Botox-like effects. (Biopharmaceutical company Revance is busy developing a topical version of Botox, to be administered by derms. The cream, purportedly as effective as the injectable but tailored to target crow's feet specifically, is currently in phase three of FDA testing and years away from availability.) There's Erasa XEP-30, which contains a patented neuropeptide designed to mimic the paralyzing effects of the venom of the Australian cone snail. And you thought a toxin derived from botulism was exotic!

For my needle-less approach, I opt to begin, appropriately, with Dr. Brandt Needles No More. Miami-based dermatologist Joely Kaufman, MD, who worked with the late Dr. Brandt in designing the quick-fix wrinkle-relaxing cream, says the key ingredient, "designed to mimic the effects we see with botulinum toxin injections," is a peptide blend that, when absorbed, blocks the signals between nerves and muscle fibers that cause contractions. The muscle-relaxing mineral magnesium was added to the cocktail to further enervate muscle movements. In an in-house peer-reviewed study, an impressive 100 percent of the test subjects reported that their brow crinkles were significantly visibly smoother in just one hour. I apply the light, vaguely minty serum liberally, and identify a satisfying wrinkle-blurring effect. Over the next few weeks, I find myself squinting and frowning in my bathroom mirror, strenuously appraising my vitalized new look—probably not the most productive wrinkle-reduction strategy.

While most dermatologists consider Botox the gold-standard short-term wrinkle eraser, there is another school of thought. For decades, Connecticut-based dermatologist Nicholas Perricone, MD, has been preaching the doctrine that wrinkles aren't what make us look old. "Youthfulness comes from convexities. When we get to our forties, those convexities start becoming flat, and then as we get really old, they become concave," Perricone says. "When I started working with celebrities, I always assumed that they were genetically gifted because they had this beautiful symmetry. But I got up close and it wasn't just symmetry." Instead, his star clients all had "more convexity in the face than the average person," meaning plump, full cheeks, foreheads and temples, a plush roundness that comes by grace of toned, healthy muscles. To him, Botox is counterintuitive: We shouldn't be paralyzing the muscles in our face, we should be pumping them up. "It's not the muscles that are the problem. It's the lack of muscles," says Perricone, who recommends aerobicizing facial muscles with electric stimulation devices.

At the Hotel Bel-Air, I once enjoyed a 90-minute electric facial with a NuFACE device. The handheld gizmo stimulates muscle contractions with microcurrent energy delivered via two metal attachments. I remember floating out of the spa, my skin feeling as fresh and petal-soft as the peonies blooming in the hotel's gardens. "Electrostimu-lation promotes the production of glycosaminoglycans, which [bind with] proteins floating around in the extracellular matrix," says Pennsylvania-based skin physiologist Peter Pugliese, MD. Dosing the skin with electricity, he says, also works on a cellular level to jump-start the creation of ATP (adenosine triphosphate, a molecule essential for cellular energy) as well as collagen and elastin, and, over time, will reduce visible crinkles while enhancing muscle tone.

I acquire my very own NuFACE, and dutifully, for five minutes a day, sweep the device in an upward motion across my cheek. It does make my face look a bit fuller, fresher, smoother—brighter, even. Though it turns out that performing this in my bathroom while the baby naps does not prove quite as restorative as enjoying a 90-minute spa treatment at the Hotel Bel-Air.

There is one more stop on the anti-wrinkle express, and for that I skip from high tech to low tech—very low—and score a pack of Frownies facial patches. The cult product was dreamed up in 1889 by a housewife, Margaret Kroesen, for her daughter, a concert pianist afflicted with frown lines from years of concentrated playing. The paper and adhesive patches pull skin into place, smooth and flat, while you sleep. Gloria Swanson wore them in Sunset Blvd.; Raquel Welch praised their powers in her book Raquel: Beyond the Cleavage. Some people wear negligees, I think as I tuck into bed. Me? Flesh-toned facial Post-its. But the next morning, I wake to find that my brow looks astonishingly well-rested (even if the rest of me is not).

Used in concert, my new arsenal of treatments has made me look somewhat more alert, vaguely less exhausted; my cheeks are more plumped up, maybe even a little more convex. I behold my napping nine-month-old, his pillowy cheeks pink from sleep, and marvel at that bounty of collagen and elastin and glycosaminoglycans, that efficient ATP, those energetic fibroblasts not yet lethargic from age. But what I marvel at most is that he doesn't know about any of this, doesn't know from wrinkles and lines, and doesn't care—he has other things to laugh, and frown, about.

This article originally appeared in the February 2016 issue of ELLE.