Age cannot wither her – and now, for just £495 a month, it won’t wrinkle her
That the launch of a – purportedly – rejuvenating moisturiser is now considered national news is, you have to admit, a kind of progress.
Well within living memory, face cream manufacturers would have found coverage of their triumphs hidden away, if they made it out of women’s magazines, somewhere within the lifestyle pages. And even there someone might ridicule the more absurd claims. Or some feminist muscle memory might respond adversely to the expectation that women should fall upon anything claimed to alleviate signs of non-youth, a project that Susan Sontag described in 1972 as women’s “passionate, corrupting effort to defeat nature: to maintain an ideal, static appearance against the progress of age”.
The realisation, accelerating since Boots’s 2006 launch of Refine & Rewind, that the project to stop women looking old is, on the contrary, a noble and edifying cause that everyone should get behind, last week ensured enthusiastic coverage (even in news sources where this was not part of a sponsorship deal) of a skincare package that costs £495 for a starter set, to last one month.
Much was made of the boast, courtesy of its marketers, that Lyma’s new product, solemnly claimed to be “the first to address why skin ages”, had attracted a waiting list of 30,000 people, many presumably existing fans of a brand that is proudly cherished by celebrities including Gwyneth Paltrow, the rectal ozone therapy authority.
To add to the good news, my own visit to the website indicated that, however prodigiously long the Lyma waiting list recently became, you can get a delivery of its “breakthrough” skin cream in around a week.
Invest and, assuming the manufacturer’s claim – “transforms skin in just 30 days” – is not deliberately worded to exclude the key word “visibly”, you could be looking at a different reflection by as early as mid-August.
“Skin doesn’t just look younger, it is younger,” Lyma insists, with its signature vague hyperbolism. But you can’t fault its effusions for a shortage of scholarly references, which include a fascinating study of albino hairless mice (“The mice were treated according to the Ethical Guidelines”). How great that the albino hairless mice could contribute, even inadvertently, to Lyma’s “proven ability to induce unprecedented transformation to the