How you CAN look YOUNGER
Unmissable series by expert who’s tried every treatment — and knows what works
Emerging from the basement clinic of a luxury West end hotel, i felt elated — even though it was 9am on a monday and i was on my way to work.
it was 2002. i was a 38-year-old beauty journalist on a national newspaper and i’d just had my first appointment with a Botox doctor — and survived.
‘What had i thought would happen?’ i scolded myself as i waited for the lift back to the lobby. it was just a few small injections in my forehead, and it took all of 15 minutes.
Then i saw myself in the lift mirror. There were five red injection marks, each slightly swollen with fluid, marching across the centre of my forehead. How would nobody notice this? And why had i left my make-up bag at home?
i dived into a department store and made for the cosmetics counter, playing with foundation samples until the damage was more or less disguised.
The marks settled down and vanished over the next day or two, and my forehead began to feel — as i had been warned it would — like a slab of fudge: thick and hard to move. After ten days, it was totally immobile. i couldn’t even twitch my eyebrows.
Yes, i looked relaxed, but i also looked like an alien. i fled to my hairdresser, who styled my fringe to hide the evidence until my face began to regain its movement.
Botox had only just been given the official greenlight for cosmetic use, and you might think the experience would have put me off it for good, but in fact it just made me more curious.
i didn’t know it then, but my curiosity about this mysterious new intersection of the medical and beauty worlds would lead me deep into the realm of cosmetic treatments. And this, in turn, would lead to me looking improbably good for my age once i hit my 50s.
Over the next 17 years, as Botox — along with chemical peels, face- plumping fillers, skinsmoothing lasers and other antiageing treatments — crept into the popular consciousness, i have tried out and reported on each new procedure.
i have witnessed the most extraordinary revolution in what we can do to hold back the ravages of time. Simply put, we no longer have to age at the rate mother nature suggests.
i really believe i look better now, at 55, than i did in my 30s. And so many other women feel the same. The number of non- surgical cosmetic treatments carried out in the UK each year is rising fast. it’s a huge business, reckoned to generate some £2.75 billion a year.
Having any sort of aesthetic procedure is now more acceptable than ever. According to research from mintel, 43 per cent of UK adults would be interested in having a cosmetic procedure that falls short of going under the knife — what i call a ‘tweakment’.
These next- level beauty treatments are no longer to be found cloistered behind the mahogany doors of Harley Street. Today, most High Street salons offer anti-ageing options, such as radiofrequency, light therapy and microneedling.
And yet, for my generation, most of us are still not happy to admit to having these procedures. Celebrities know this, and tend to be — in public at least — in denial about just how much they indulge in them, despite many appearing to be frozen in time.
Closer to home, people are often content to keep their tweakments to themselves. Think of any of your particularly youthful friends or colleagues. Are you sure they just have a great skincare routine or won the genetic lottery?
i think there are legions of women (and men!) out there who are very happy to have a little help to look young, but never breathe a word about it.
i, on the other hand, have no such compunction — and now i’m sharing all the secrets to how i look this good at 55 in an exclusive series adapted from my book, which runs all next week in the mail.
Over the past couple of decades, i have tried the vast majority of procedures on the market, so i know which ones work best, which ones hurt the most, and which ones aren’t worth bothering with.
Think of it as the ultimate guide to next-level beauty, which will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about turning back the clock, but were too scared to ask. But first, here are the nine rules anyone thinking of having a treatment should follow — rules i’ve learnt the hard way . . .
1. FUSSPOTS LOOK FABULOUS
THe first rule of engagement when it comes to tweakments is to find a great practitioner and research them. Then research them again. not just their qualifications, but their results, too — their social media or websites are likely to show before-and-after pictures.
if their patients look very ‘done’ and you want the natural look, move on. Be discerning. Be demanding. Do they have an artistic eye for enhancing faces? Just as not all hairdressers are nicky Clarke, not all practitioners can judge how best to beautify a face.
Where to start? go to industry organisations such as the British College of Aesthetic medicine (BCAm), which represents the top aesthetic doctors, and the British Association of Cosmetic nurses ( BACn), whose members are qualified and registered nurses. Then research, research, research.
2. ...AND GUINEA PIGS DON’T
i KnOW it’s all very well my saying this when i have been first in the queue for experimental treatments for all these years, but please, if you are offered an exciting new procedure, wait until it has been properly proven before you jump in.
i’ve tried extreme new treatments that simply didn’t give results, such as the grow- your- own facelift, where my cells were cloned then condensed into a skin-reviving cocktail. Part was cryogenically stored for the future, and part was injected back into my face. it was an amazing idea, but it just didn’t work!
i’ve been made to look wonky by numerous Botox doctors, and i once ended up with half my forehead paralysed for three months after a supposedly breakthrough new Botoxalternative treatment. it killed a chunk of the nerve which tells the
forehead muscles to lift, but I had no idea it might work on one side and not the other.
In time, the nerve grew back, but I won’t go there again, and would recommend you don’t either. The rule? Do as I say, not as I do!
3. BOTOX IS SAFER THAN YOU THINK
YES, it is derived from a deadly poison (botulinum toxin), but it is the dose that makes a substance poisonous, and in cosmetic use, Botox is used in tiny quantities.
as it is potentially so dangerous, the substance has been studied in greater depth than any other cosmetic treatment. It has been used in higher doses for nearly 50 years to help those with muscle spasticity control their limbs, too.
It is prescription-only, so solely doctors and nurse-prescribers can legally obtain it. The worst that can happen is overtreatment. This may leave you with a ‘frozen’ expression, or ptosis — a droopy brow or eyelid. But as your muscles recover their function, this gets back to normal. It usually takes two to four months, depending on the dose used.
4. BUT WATCH OUT FOR FILLERS
IN THE right hands, fillers are brilliant. Choose a good practitioner and you will get lovely results, which soften the hollowness that can creep into an ageing face and lips without distorting them.
But the awful thing is that, due to the dire lack of regulation in aesthetic medicine in the UK, fillers are not a prescription product. That means anyone can legally buy them and use them on others.
We’ve all seen what happens to celebrities when fillers are overused. But there are worse possibilities than ending up looking weird. Cack-handed practitioners who lack medical training may not be able to manage complications. If they accidentally inject filler into a blood vessel, it can block that vessel, which can lead to ulceration, swelling and tissue necrosis.
5. BEWARE THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
ONCE you start turning back the clock, you have to know when to stop. It’s easy for one thing to lead to another, and before you know it you have a billiard-ball forehead, with cartoon-villain eyebrows atop well-padded cheeks, and unfeasibly plump lips — and it’s horribly, horribly obvious.
I like to let whatever I have had done wear off (all these treatments are temporary) before I start on the next thing.
That means no more Botox until I can create four whole horizontal lines on my forehead when I lift my eyebrows — this usually takes me about three months — and no more filler until my face is starting to look hollow again, which takes a year on average. I have no interest in looking odd or plastic, and neither should you.
6. IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START
ONE friend, who had staunchly remained a Botox virgin her whole life, made her first foray into the world of tweakments last year at the age of 74.
She is thrilled about the way
judicious doses of Botox, fillers and injectable moisturisers have softened the entrenched wrinkles on her forehead, lifted the contours of her face and smoothed her skin.
Most practitioners I know have at least one patient in their 80s, and see no reason why the latest cosmetic options should be denied to them.
7. NEEDLE-PHOBICS CAN GIVE IT A GO
IF YOU’D never go near the sharp end of a Botox needle, there are plenty of tweakments that might tempt you.
In the first exclusive extract that runs on Monday, I go through the new ‘facials with benefits’ — treatments that are much more effective than the pampering, old-style salon facials, yet not half as scary as the procedures you would find in a medical cosmetic clinic.
These facials are boosted with light versions of technologies such as radiofrequency (which has a tightening, ‘shrink-wrapping’ effect on the skin), microneedling or lasers. While they won’t have the sort of dramatic effect that in-clinic procedures can achieve, they certainly deliver results after a course of treatments.
And then there is the plethora of beauty gadgets designed for home use. I’m always being asked whether these actually work, and the answer is yes, absolutely — if you can commit to using them diligently and for long enough.
8. DON’T FORGET YOUR SKINCARE
WHATEVER tweakments you may or may not be contemplating, skincare must remain the bedrock of your beauty regime. The ritual of cleansing and moisturising should be a small fragment of ‘me time’ with which to bookend the day.
And whatever you do, don’t forget the sunscreen. Every practitioner I’ve interviewed has warned me about how UV light slowly erodes the collagen that keeps our skin firm, and provokes the pigment that builds up into age spots.
And yes, you do need to wear sunscreen in boring old grey UK daylight, too. If you’re serious about looking after your skin and preserving the effects of any tweakments you might try, you have to wear the stuff every single day.
9. TWEAKMENTS DO WORK WONDERS!
OF COURSE they do. Just look at me. I look far better now, at nearly 56, than I did at the turn of the century — and not just because I no longer have three under-fives to contend with.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think I look like a 37-year-old, but I know I look better than I did when I was 37. And I definitely don’t look as old as I ought to. I look fresher and less tired, with better bone-structure, thanks to careful placement of deep filler.
And isn’t it wonderful that we now have the option to do these things? In decades past, the choices were ageing gracefully or a full facelift with scalpels, sedation and an outlay of more than £10,000. Neither of those choices are ones I’d like to make, so thank goodness there’s now a third way.