ChangeYour INHERITANCE
The lines and folds of your mother’s appearance reveal your own future – but is there a way to escape your genetic code? By Hannah Betts.
omewhere in a tangle of fairy tale and DNA there lies an immutable truth: some day, we will peer into a lookingglass and our mother will gaze back. For me, this was a painful aspect of my thirties, when my mother resolved upon a 10-year separation from me, yet I was daily haunted by the architecture of pallor, nose, and cheekbone; her face in my face a lacerating absent presence. In time, it comes to us all. Mothers: can’t live with ’em, can’t live without becoming ’em, in complexion no less than behaviour.
Dr. Michael Prager – begetter of natural-looking face fixing, possessor of a reassuringly real yet nipperish complexion – is acquainted with the phenomenon. Patients will bring images of their mothers, or even said matriarchs themselves, to illustrate what they want to avoid. “It’s exorcism,” he quips, “taking the mother out of the daughter.”
Sun, smoking, stress, diet, and alcohol put their destructive mark on our inherited features. Nevertheless, the foundation of our ageing is nature rather than nurture. This is evidenced not merely in, say, the dryness that might tend towards wrinkles, or pallor to provoke pigmentation, but in inherited face shape. Prager has an unrivalled eye for the face’s structure. His ‘Prager lift’ is minutely tailored, leaving movement and the odd line (after all, even six-years-olds have wrinkles).
Volume can be added to cavernous