up to your neck

Avoiding, reversing and concealing the ‘crêpey décolletage’

‘Is that going to happen to me?’ For the f irst 20-odd years of my life, adults were viewed through the filter of that question. When my father said, ‘Can we turn that down? I can’t talk and listen to music at t he same t ime,’ I’d gawp, gulp and wonder: ‘Is that going to happen to me?’ If I heard older colleagues lamenting ‘day two’ of a hangover, I’d commiserate, pause, and then whisper: ‘Is that going to happen to me?’ But nothing instilled teeth-chattering terror quite like the sight of a crêpey décolletage. one minute I’d be talking to someone, the next my gaze would drop five inches, and boom! there was a parched plateau of chest f lesh that looked like it belonged in National Geo

graphic – beneath a headline containing the words ‘arid badlands’, perhaps – but had no place on the human body.

You’d think that the kamikaze tanning would have stopped t hen a nd there. that I’d have renounced the midday sun in an instant, and forsaken the spf2 ambre solaire huile Bronzante Intense for something more sensible, something with the coverage and consistency of plaster of paris. But logic and follow-through only come later – with the age spots and the parched plateaus of flesh.

Well, they’re a testament to a life well lived, right? Wrong. By all means, let wisdom and experience inscribe themselves across your face, but nobody wants a wise and experienced chest – and now that spring has sprung, there’s no hiding behind high necklines and scarves. thanks to products from concealers to clock-reversing treatments, you don’t have to.