If you are keen to change your facial appearance by having Botox treatment, you might want to know a bit more about the substance first.

Botox, or, to give it its proper name, botulinum toxin, works by actually causing muscles to go into partial paralysis. This makes them less flexible, which sounds bad, except that when used in the right way the word ‘flexible’ can be replaced with ‘saggy’. This enables it to firm up your face and remove wrinkles.

If that sounds like something cleverly manufactured synthetically in a lab by boffins funded by the cosmetics industry, think again. In fact, Botox was discovered quite by accident in 1987, by Vancouver-based dermatologist Alastair Carruthers and his wife Jean, an eye doctor.

A condition called blepharospasm, which leads to spasms of the eye and surrounding tissue, was already being treated by using injections of botulinum toxin and one of Jean’s patients complained to her one day that she had not injected any into her forehead, because when she did, “my wrinkles go away”.

Discussing this revelation with her husband, it seemed a new cosmetic discovery had been made. Their receptionist agreed to be the first Guinea pig and it swiftly became clear that a revolutionary new use for the treatment had been discovered.

The botulinum toxin itself had been discovered by Belgian scientist Emile Pierre van Ermengem following a lethal botulism food poisoning outbreak in the 1890s (a key feature of this kind of toxin is that it sends muscles into spasm, which is why if ingested in large enough quantities it can cause deadly paralysis in vital organs).

However, despite attempts to isolate it at the University of California from the 1920s onwards,  the toxin was not fully isolated in crystalline form until Dr Edward Schantz did so in the early 1940s.

By the 1970s, the technology and understanding of the toxin had developed to the point where it could be used therapeutically for muscular conditions, paving the way for the accidental discovery of its potential in cosmetic surgery.