At Marina ManLand in the Los Angeles area, plastic surgeon Grant Stevens is injecting Botox into men as never before. He advertises his sports bar-esque practice with the image of a man on a leather couch, drinking a highball and smoking a cigar. It’s working.
“I’m doing more male surgery than ever before in my entire career,” Stevens said.
ManLand is emblematic of a trend that’s sweeping the medical aesthetics industry as the distributors of drugs such as Botox, Dysport and Xeomin step up their efforts to sell cosmetic drugs to men. None may be more prominent right now than Allergan Plc’s push to market what the media has dubbed “Brotox.” In April, the drugmaker rolled out print, television and social media ads in attempt to lure male customers, running them during baseball games and the Stanley Cup finals.
“We’ve had campaigns over the past several years, but not quite on this scale,” Bill Meury, chief commercial officer at Allergan, said in a phone interview. He would not disclose the size of the investment, but he said it was “significant.”
For now, men are a tiny piece of the medical aesthetics market. They received nearly 470,000 injections of wrinkle-smoothing toxins in 2017, compared to more than 7.2 million in women, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Tapping into that demographic hasn’t been easy. While male injections have increased almost fivefold since 2000, they’re growing at a much slower pace than injections in women.
Allergan is in a race with its competitors to figure out how to win over men at a faster rate. Nestlé Skin Health’s Galderma, which markets rival injection Dysport in the U.S., has been targeting men for about two years through a man-specific website and said it saw a 45 percent increase in men enrolling in its loyalty program in the 12 months to May, outpacing growth in female loyalty sign-ups. Merz Pharma cheekily markets its Xeomin frown-line injections to "Xeo-Men,” through brochures and a website it launched in 2016.
Allergan may have an advantage with Botox.
“It’s an iconic brand,” Meury said at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch health-care conference in May.
Even so, it’s an iconic brand that resonates mostly with women. A webpage Allergan created addresses myths, such as the belief that Botox is only for women. “Nope, think again,” the website says, adding Botox has been approved for cosmetic uses since 2002 and that “you’ll still look like you” after the injections.
“I’m doing more male surgery than ever before in my entire career”