Beauty bible

Staying firm like the French

ANYONE WHO HAS spent as long as I have wandering around Parisian pharmacies will know that our ageless French counterparts are obsessed with two things: intestinal flora and firm busts. The flora thing remains a bit of a mystery. I’m down with the whole ‘good bacteria’ concept, but I’ve never understood why every French friend feels the need to carry around little vials of them in their Jérôme Dreyfuss satchels, whipping them out midway through their niçoise and extolling their benefits in the lowered tones of some street-corner dealer.

Firm busts, on the other hand, are worthy of excessive attention – and yet we Brits tend to ignore that whole area. Anything above the clavicle we’re happy to cleanse, tone, hydrate and treat in a succession of bizarre new ways – content to drop extortionate sums of money on Jamaican barley and pigeonpoo facials (can you guess which one of those is an actual thing?), ultrasound and radio-frequency skin-tightening packages (the best out there in my view). And yet the only treatment for what lies a few inches down seems to be the sighand-shrug: ‘It’s just getting older, innit?’

Non, non et non! They may indeed largely be ‘excess body fat’, as my Aussie-beefcake personal trainer once described female breasts (yes, he is single), but because of our changing shape and skin-elasticity levels over the years, through pregnancy and weight loss and everything in between, they deserve special attention, argues cosmetic doctor Rita Rakus. ‘The décolletage is so often neglected, yet this is one of the biggest telltale signs of age, since the skin on our chest area is very thin and sensitive,’ she explains.

The rise in women booking into her Knightsbridge clinic either for ‘non-invasive Fraxel’ (a skin-resurfacing laser technology that can repair sun damage and eradicate pigmentation) or Ultracel (another highly effective non-surgical tightening and lifting treatment) is reassuring. And there’s a handful of products that will give you great results at home, so in terms of catching up with the pert-bosomed French, we’re making progress. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take us quite as long to understand the importance of matching underwear.