HOW YOU CAN LOOK YOUNGER
She’s tried every anti-ageing treatment under the sun. Now, launching a Mail series that could change your life, beauty expert ALICE HART-DAVIS reveals...
EMERGING from the basement clinic of a luxury West End hotel, I felt elated — even though it was 9am on a Monday and I was on my way to work. It was 2002. I was a 38-year-old beauty journalist on a national newspaper and I’d just had my first appointment with a Botox doctor — and survived.
‘What had I thought would happen?’ I scolded myself as I waited for the lift back to the lobby. It was just a few small injections in my forehead, and it took all of 15 minutes.
Then I saw myself in the lift mirror. There were five red injection marks, each slightly swollen with fluid, marching across the centre of my forehead. How would nobody notice this? And why had I left my make-up bag at home?
I dived into a department store and made for the cosmetics counter, playing with foundation samples until the damage was more or less disguised.
The marks settled down and vanished over the next day or two, and my forehead began to feel — as I had been warned it would — like a slab of fudge: thick and hard to move. After ten days, it was totally immobile. I couldn’t even twitch my eyebrows.
Yes, I looked relaxed, but I also looked like an alien. I fled to my hairdresser, who styled my fringe to hide the evidence until my face began to regain its movement.
Botox had only just been given the official greenlight for cosmetic use, and you might think the experience would have put me off it for good, but in fact it just made me more curious.
I didn’t know it then, but my curiosity about this mysterious new intersection of the medical and beauty worlds would lead me deep into the realm of cosmetic treatments. And this, in turn, would lead to me looking improbably good for my age once I hit my 50s.
Over the next 17 years, as Botox — along with chemical peels, face-plumping fillers, skinsmoothing lasers and other anti-ageing treatments — crept into the popular consciousness, I have tried out and reported on each new procedure.
I have witnessed the most extraordinary revolution in what we can do to hold back the ravages of time. Simply put, we no longer have to age at the rate Mother Nature suggests.
I really believe I look better now, at 55, than I did in my 30s. And so many other women feel the same.
The number of non-surgical cosmetic treatments carried out each year is rising fast. It’s a huge business, generating billions worldwide annually.
Having any sort of aesthetic procedure is now more acceptable than ever. According to research from Mintel, 43 per cent of adults would be interested in having a cosmetic procedure that falls short of going under the knife — what I call a ‘tweakment’.
These next-level beauty treatments are no longer to be found cloistered behind the mahogany doors of London’s famed Harley Street.
Today, most high street salons offer anti-ageing options, such as radiofrequency, light therapy and microneedling.
And yet, for my generation, most of us are still not happy to admit to having these procedures. Celebrities know this, and tend to be — in public at least — in denial about just how much they indulge in them, despite many appearing to be frozen in time.
Closer to home, people are often content to keep their tweakments to themselves. Think of any of your particularly youthful friends or colleagues. Are you sure they just have a great skincare routine or won the genetic lottery?
I think there are legions of women (and men!) out there who are very happy to have a little help to look young, but never breathe a word about it.
I, on the other hand, have no such compunction — and now I’m sharing all the secrets to how I look this good at 55 in an exclusive series adapted from my book, which runs all next week in the Mail.
Over the past couple of decades, I have tried the vast majority of procedures on the market, so I know which ones work best, which ones hurt the most, and which ones aren’t worth bothering with.
Think of it as the ultimate guide to next-level beauty, which will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about turning back the clock, but were too scared to ask.
But first, here are the nine rules anyone thinking of having a treatment should follow — rules I’ve learnt the hard way...
1. FUSSPOTS LOOK FABULOUS
THE first rule of engagement when it comes to tweakments is to find a great practitioner and research them. Then research them again. Not just their qualifications, but their results, too — their social media or websites are likely to show before-and-after pictures.
If their patients look very ‘done’ and you want the natural look, move on. Be discerning. Be demanding. Do they have an artistic eye for enhancing faces? Just as not all hairdressers are Nicky Clarke, not all practitioners can judge how best to beautify a face.
Where to start? Go to industry organisations such as the Irish Association of Plastic Surgeons (IAPS), which has made repeated calls to medical authorities and the Government for the cosmetic beauty industry to be more regulated. Then research, research, research.
2 . ... AND GUINEA PIGS DON’T
I KNOW it’s all very well my saying this when I have been first in the queue for experimental treatments for all these years, but please, if you are offered an exciting new procedure, wait until it has been proven before you jump in.
I’ve tried extreme new treatments that simply didn’t give results, such as the grow-your-own facelift, where my cells were cloned then condensed into a skin-reviving cocktail. Part was cryogenically stored for the future, and part was injected back into my face.
It was an amazing idea, but it just didn’t work!
I’ve been made to look wonky by numerous Botox doctors, and I once ended up with half my forehead paralysed for three months after a supposedly breakthrough new Botox-alternative treatment. It killed a chunk of the nerve which tells the forehead muscles to lift, but I had no idea it might work on one side and not the other.
In time, the nerve grew back, but I won’t go there again, and would recommend you don’t either. The rule? Do as I say, not as I do!
3. BOTOX IS SAFER THAN YOU THINK
YES, it is derived from a deadly poison (botulinum toxin), but it is the dose that makes a substance poisonous, and in cosmetic use, Botox is used in tiny quantities.
As it is potentially so dangerous, the substance has been studied in greater depth than any other cosmetic treatment. It has been used in higher doses for nearly 50 years to help those with muscle spasticity control their limbs, too.
It is prescription-only, so solely doctors and nurse-prescribers can legally obtain it. The worst that can happen is overtreatment. This may leave you with a ‘frozen’ expression, or ptosis — a droopy brow or eyelid. But as your muscles recover their function, this gets back to normal.