A new Botox trend favoured by brides-to-be is gaining popularity in Ireland as a treatment to slim the neck and shoulder lines after recently going viral on TikTok.
Traptox, which refers to the injection of Botox into the trapezius muscle, aims to provide a slimmer and more contoured appearance in the upper neck and shoulders. The treatment has been available in Asia for at least a decade but has become popular in Europe and the US in recent months, with videos of the procedure gaining 3.8 million views on TikTok.
Kim Kardashian has been alleged to have received the treatment after she said in the latest series of The Kardashians that she could not use her neck muscles to sing because half of them “were probably botoxed”.
Brian Cotter, co-founder of Sisu Clinic, which has 14 locations across Ireland as well as clinics in New York, Florida and London, has been providing traptox for years and said demand for the treatment had increased in the past three or four months.
Cotter said the procedure was particularly popular among brides-to-be who were planning to wear an open-back dress at their wedding. Botox injected into the trapezius muscle has traditionally been provided as a treatment to people experiencing muscle tightness, pain or stress.
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“Normally these kinds of treatment get cute names — it’s also known as swan neck Botox on TikTok — but we would call it trapezius Botox, and it’s really beginning to grow in popularity,” he said.
“We do it for cosmesis, so sometimes their trapezius muscles are a little bit bulky or a little bit fuller than they want them to be, and what we do is we relax that muscle with Botox to give it a slightly slimmer appearance. The other reason we use it is for people that often get a lot of tension in their neck line and shoulders because the main function of Botox is that it relaxes the muscle.”
He added: “We also sometimes get people coming in and they get it for both. They might feel tired of getting massages or going for physio all the time, and they’ve read about this treatment and they come in and they chat to us about it.”
Cotter said it was a “very” safe procedure and that it cost about €500 at Sisu. “It’s a series of maybe three to four injections on each side with a tiny needle,” he said. “Everyone’s talking about it on TikTok and we find, coming into summertime, it’s something that patients come in for more due to the clothes that they’re wearing.”
Tiffany Depuis, 30, an account manager from Cork, is due to get traptox at Sisu Clinic next week after learning about the treatment through TikTok. “I was searching for a solution to having extremely tight shoulders that I’ve developed over the years — it’s something I’ve been conscious of as far as I can remember,” she said.
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“I got really into the gym a couple of years ago and the more I was training, the more I realised my trap muscles were getting bigger and bigger, so aesthetically they started to look quite tense as well. I was doing lots of yoga, and started getting weekly massages. I had no idea traptox was a thing until I came across it on TikTok and then started researching it and realised that it’s a new thing that doctors are doing.”
Michelle Westcott, a medical aesthetic doctor and head of training at the Aesthetic Training Academy Ireland in Swords, north Dublin, said an increasing number of people had been inquiring about traptox at the academy.
She said: “I think it’s arisen from actually doing other treatments and then accidentally a woman’s neck became a little slimmer and more silhouetted, but it’s now become a treatment on its own because it’s trending on TikTok. It’s the standard treatment for migraines or neck spasming that we would have used anyway, where we inject Botox into the back of the neck and the trapezius muscle. We are now getting queries about it as an aesthetic treatment, but it hasn’t been overwhelming — we’re always a little bit behind the UK and US. We do some off-label treatments in training so it is something we may add to our training here.”
Thérapie Clinic, which has 22 locations in Ireland and four in the north, expects to start offering traptox treatments in the coming weeks. Daniel Dongwhee Lim, a Botox doctor at the clinic, said: “We are just finalising the details at the moment and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be launched across all Thérapie clinics.
“It’s really popular and I’m getting a lot of people asking me about it. I had a client the other day who was saying she wanted the treatment. There aren’t any legal problems with this treatment and it’s completely safe, and there are other clinics already offering it.”
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Dongwhee Lim said that many clients were not aware of the treatment because it was only beginning to become popular in western countries. “Traptox has actually been around for a long period of time in Asia — especially China, Korea and Japan,” he said.
“The purpose of injecting Botox is to paralyse the muscle and this is also a medical treatment where people have pain or headaches as it basically relaxes the muscle. So what we’re trying to do is to inject the Botox to relax the trapezius muscle so that the overactive shoulder muscles get slimmer.”
Paul Munsanje, a medical director and owner of Amara Clinic, a skincare clinic in south Dublin, does not provide traptox but said he had received two inquiries about it from clients last week. “It’s not unusual for new off-licence treatments to come online,” he said.
The clinic provides mostly cosmetic procedures rather than medical treatments, he said, and “this use of Botox off-licence is a bit unusual because it weakens the muscle of a person that doesn’t have a physiological problem with their muscle — their muscle is fine. I’d be a little bit averse to trying out this treatment for that reason because you’d have someone who may have a muscle that doesn’t look good to them, but the actual function of the muscle is just fine.”
