I spent £9,000 going under the knife to lose my scraggy neck
Friends and family told former Vogue Editor-at-Large FIONA GOLFAR she was crazy. But she doesn’t regret it one bit
This time last year, my life was changing. i was facing an uncertain future. i had decided to leave my job as Editor-atLarge of British Vogue after 25 years. i was 55 years old and to say i was feeling vulnerable would be an understatement.
Leaving a job after so many years is a big deal. Not quite like leaving a marriage, but still painful and with a big sense of loss.
At the same time i decided to leave my job, i made the decision to say goodbye to my scraggy neck. i needed a morale boost and while i am not afraid of my age and i never try to hide it, i did have issues with my neck. i have always had issues with its
crepiness. i had good skin on my face, but my jowls and neck were loose and the skin was papery.
i remember looking at my face in the rear-view mirror one day as i was driving
(don’t we all?). The sight of it made me pull over there and then and call my friend Olivia, who has a business connecting people to cosmetic surgeons.
Within ten minutes of that call i was
booked in with consultant plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover — the next day!
The moment i met him, i knew he was the man for me. i had seen various surgeons over the years about my neck, but had never been convinced it was the right time, or that they were quite the right person for me.
i liked Mr Grover’s precise, cool, nononsense manner and his obsession with his craft. he asked me to bring photos of myself from ten years ago and made it clear that, while i was never going to have the neck of a swan, i could have one that was vastly improved. Maybe one of a really good chicken, i thought.
‘i won’t give you a new neck,’ he stressed. ‘That can’t be done, but i will give you the one you used to have before the muscles
It’s great to be a blonde. With low expectations it’s very easy to surprise people PAMELA ANDERSON
became slack. I like to say this operation can turn the clock back eight to ten years.’
He went on to show me where he would operate, lifting muscle at the side of my neck, my jawline and the cheek by about 80 degrees in total, and cutting approximately 2cm of loose tissue away. I would have scars behind my ears and at the base of my scalp on either side. It sounded worth it.
at this point I should confess that this is not the first time I have gone under the knife. about ten years ago I had a tummy tuck.
I hadn’t planned to; it was an impulse decision and one that my then editor and many of my friends and family felt was a very poor decision. But I did it anyway and was thrilled with my new flat stomach.
unsurprisingly perhaps, my friends and family had the same reservations now as they had then. Why would you want to put your life at risk with a general anaesthetic and full- blown operation when you’re healthy?
and on such a sensitive area of your body — the neck being far less robust than a generous stomach? Especially when there are so many ‘tweakments’ available?
But I had tried quite a few tweakments — an ultherapy ultrasound lift, laser treatment, mesotherapy — and still hated my neck.
I also got the feeling, though nobody actually said it to me, that going under the knife implied I was of lower intelligence, that I couldn’t call myself a feminist if I wanted to change my body enough to have my skin sliced open.
I ignored the naysayers. surely the whole point of being a woman these days is having choice?
WHEnthe day of the operation came, I was terrified. I felt conflicted — and frankly silly. In the cab heading to the hospital, I was a sweaty mess of self-loathing and doubt. Why was I doing this? Why couldn’t I just let my vanity go and age the way nature intended?
I suppose the fact I didn’t stop the cab betrays the fact my vanity was stronger than my fear.
I arrived at 6am, alone. It was easier that my husband didn’t come with me — my own apprehension was bad enough. I signed some consent forms and Mr Grover came to see me at about 7am.
He took pictures of me standing in the three positions you see in police mug shots, then made marks down my neck and under my chin to guide him where to cut.
By that point I was so scared, I simply switched my brain off. It was, I felt, too late to run.
It’s a pretty long operation — three-anda-half hours — and when I woke up I felt thick- headed. literally. My head felt encased, and it was. In the mirror, I saw I was cocooned in a padded bandage with four drainage tubes running out of the sides of my head, kept in place by some sort of Hilda Ogden-style netting.
I had staples in my skull behind my ears and stitches running from the lobes along the back of the ear. There were also staples at the base of my head on either side, about an inch long.
I took some selfies and could see that, under the bandage wrapped around my head, I was still me, but with a nice jawline and a smooth neck.
I spent two nights in hospital. When the bandage came off after the first night, it was clear my skin had barely bruised, which apparently is the sign of a very good surgeon.
My hair was washed for me the next day by a nurse, and I was told not to wash it for the first week (but I have to admit I did).
On the third day I was discharged with some flesh-coloured tape under my chin to support the muscles. I was to keep it on for a week and then wear a stretchy chin strap for four hours a day for the next two weeks.
I didn’t leave my house for a fortnight as Mr Grover advised against too much movement. Instead, I was holed up on a strict soft-food-only diet, eating scrambled eggs and yoghurt in front of the TV. luckily it coincided with Wimbledon.
My face felt tight and uncomfortable as the skin began to heal, but that eased when the staples were taken out after a week.
Overall, my recovery wasn’t as painful as expected — nothing that couldn’t be managed with some paracetamol.
The scars around my earlobes
barely showed and I had no trouble moving my face — to brush my teeth, for example.
After the first few weeks, friends couldn’t tell I had had an operation other than a slight skin discoloration, which faded after a few months. But I could.
Although my jawline was tight and my neck smooth, my face was numb. Mr Grover told me this was because the nerve endings needed to knit themselves back together, which would take about a year.
There was also a healthy smattering of broken capillaries on my cheeks, which Mr Grover assured me would also fade with time. The numbness did eventually turn to a tingle — a sign the nerve endings are healing — but it’s still not yet gone today. The capillaries didn’t fade either, so I had to wear foundation to cover them, something I have never done.
After six months, I started to
have them lasered and now they have almost disappeared. So here I am a year later, and how does it look? Well, I am thrilled with my face and my jawline is tight. I look like me, only fresher.
I would like to say that everything was perfect, that I had reached a point where I was satisfied with my appearance and that, when people asked me with that look on their faces: ‘You won’t do anything else, will you?’, I was able to say ‘No!’
But that’s not the case. I had invested in a new neck; I wanted it to look the best it could. I didn’t want the neck of a 16year-old, but I did want my face and neck to match and they didn’t.
I noticed after about six months that, although it was no longer saggy, the skin on my neck, particularly at the base, was looking thin and papery again.
The plumpness I had been so thrilled with in the hospital was
partly due to post- operative swelling, which subsided within a few weeks. I was conflicted. Should I let it go or, having come this far, was there anything I could do to make it plumper and more like my face?
So I called Olivia again. I told her I didn’t want more cosmetic surgery — I know when enough is enough — but that I was concerned about the texture of the skin on my neck.
Olivia suggested I meet Sabrina Shah-Desai who, although an eye specialist, was working with a new treatment called Tixel which is designed to encourage collagen production and help the quality of your skin.
Skin is skin, I thought, and if there is something that works on the crepey skin under the eyes, why wouldn’t it fix the same problem on my neck?
I went to see Sabrina at her clinic on Harley Street. She took one look at my neck and explained in detail why just having surgery isn’t always enough.
The neck, explained Sabrina, ages ahead of the face because the skin is extremely thin. It also has
less fatty tissue than the face, is not supported by bones, and its major muscles are unsupported. I was beginning to feel quite sorry for my poor old neck.
Sabrina went on to explain that, while neck lift surgery was a good option and that the procedure I had undergone looked excellent, we now had to look at the nonsurgical options to treat the quality of the skin. She suggested a combination approach over three months using injectables.
As he made the felt tip marks on my neck, I was so terrified I switched my brain off. It was too late to run ...
THefirst stage was Tixel, the treatment to increase the body’s collagen production. My neck was numbed and zapped with the Tixel machine, which creates micro- channels through pores in the skin, then a ‘repair, refill, stimulate’ serum is immediately applied. This triggers the body to generate its own collagen.
Sabrina then gave me a collagenboosting cream with strict instructions to apply it every hour for five hours. The downtime from
Tixel was minimal and painless — my neck was reddish for a day or so and felt slightly sunburnt.
Sabrina suggested I use Neostrata triple firming neck cream (£39, amazon.co.uk) twice a day.
Sabrina recommended three Tixel treatments, each four weeks apart. It takes a minimum of three months to develop new collagen and the skin tightening results can last 12 to 24 months.
STAGetwo was Profhilo, a filler that disperses easily under the skin, unlike more conventional fillers that remain where they are injected.
The result is a dewy plumpness — but my skin did look lumpy for the first 24 hours where the filler was injected in about eight different areas over the neck ending at the collar bone.
It’s not painful at all, amazingly, though I wouldn’t advise going on a date on the day you do this as it looks a bit like you have been bitten by a super-bug.
Immediately I could see a difference in the skin. Finally my neck was almost beginning to match my face.
Over three months I had three Tixel treatments costing around £750 per session, four of Profhilo at £450 per session and, in the final appointment, some Botox at £400 per session to relax the rope-like bands of the neck muscles.
I can see a huge difference in the quality of the skin on my neck. What Mr Grover had tightened, Sabrina plumped. In total, it cost about £13,000, so it was a huge investment.
But I figured I had come this far with the surgery and I may as well go for the optimum results.
So, am I finally happy? I think having my neck done, and feeling good about the results, has given me a huge confidence boost and I have no regrets.
Am I done with the treatments? Let’s see how I feel when this starts to wear off. Never say never! And if my family start groaning then I will have to deal with it. I do know I don’t want to go under the knife again.
I know it was a vanity project and that there are more profound ways of feeling good about oneself but it worked for me, and finally I have been able to put my best face forward in my new life.