The woman who claims she can Turn back the hands of time
They’re notorious for betraying our true age. So can a £750 treatment make hands younger?
The easiest way to tell a woman’s true age? her hands. Certainly that’s true of mine, which, as I look down at them right now tapping away at my keyboard, suddenly look so — what is the word? Rural?
Years of sun exposure, slightly obsessive handwashing, hand dryers, doing the washing up with holey rubber gloves, and generally treating my hands as secondclass citizens in comparison with the rest of me have obviously taken their toll.
As with Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman and so many other female celebrities, my hand age is at least ten years older than the rest of my 57-year-old self. Madonna’s hands, in particular, are in strong contrast to her shockingly line-free face and Barbie-doll hair.
It’s funny how much we’ll spend on plumping, smoothing and tightening every other inch of our bodies, yet somehow we forget about our hands. I’ll happily put my hand up here: I’ve had fillers, Botox, skin tightening, CoolSculpting fat removal, you name it.
Given that they are always on view, not just to others but to ourselves, every moment of the day, would it not be sensible to make them a priority? Margaret Dabbs certainly thinks so. A podiatrist by training, Dabbs is known primarily as the person to see for beautiful feet. She opened her first foot clinic in harley Street in 1998. But now the fiftysomething blonde is turning her attention to hands.
She is the first in Britain to offer the Laser Rejuvenation hand Lift, a new treatment which, she says, has been ‘clinically proven to stimulate and regrow new healthy skin cells from the hypodermis, which will tighten and illuminate the skin, visibly minimise the effects of ageing and successfully regenerate lost collagen’.
In other words, it is a face-lift for the hands and is going to make my wrinkles, especially the deep creases round my knuckles, disappear, not just for a day but, with enough treatments, indefinitely.
The laser reactivates production of collagen, the protein that keeps our skin elastic and smooth when we’re in our 20s but gradually diminishes as we grow older. Stimulating the cells in our bodies to keep producing it really is the holy Grail of anti-ageing.
STRANGeLY, I am quite proud of my wrinkly old mitts. Maybe Madonna is proud of hers, too. ‘Lady of leisure’ hands are no badge of honour in the 21st century — I’ve earned these ‘worker’s hands’ and it’s not as if I ever entertained fantasies of becoming a hand model.
But at the same time I’m cross with them for giving me away. My hands used to be a canvas for expressing my creativity through crazy nail polish and cocktail rings.
But I can’t remember the last time I wore my rings, and pockets have become an obsession when it comes to buying new clothes. So a non-invasive, relatively wince-free handlift? Bring it on!
First, though, the gel nail varnish has to go, a laborious process which takes at least an hour. Gels, according to Dabbs, are terrible for nails, as the acetone bath needed to scrape them off makes the nails weak, dry and flaky in a way they would never be with normal nail polish remover.
‘Think of what your teeth are like under veneers,’ is Dabbs’s chilling analogy. Then there is the UVA light used to harden the liquid gel polish, which research shows damages skin cells in much the same way as sunbeds.
Such a shame, given that I’ve only recently discovered gels and have been extolling their virtues to others ever since. After making me promise never to have them again, Dabbs gets me in her treatment chair and immediately starts poring over the backs of my hands.
My biggest problem, apparently, is weak skin elasticity and wrinkling, especially round the knuckles (not a good look under rings at all). The skin is very thin, too, which is why my veins look so gnarly.
This thinness, it turns out, is a benefit in terms of the treatment because it means the laser can more easily reach the hypodermis — the area of fatty connective tissue that attaches the skin to underlying bone and muscle.
It is here that the laser will stimulate the regrowth of healthy skin cells, producing collagen and thereby thickening and plumping the skin to make it look younger and smoother (look at your children’s hands compared with yours and you’ll see what I mean).
‘Our hands reveal a story that sometimes the rest of us doesn’t,’ Dabbs says. her own hands are remarkably smooth and youthful-looking, despite being tanned from a recent trip to Barbados. ‘It’s like when you put a suit on a farmer. You can
always tell they’re a farmer, can’t you?’
First, Dabbs draws a matrix on the back of each hand with a white wax pencil. Then, with a laser pen, she targets each tiny square with a 20-second pulse of light.
Does it hurt? Not at all on my first visit (the course, which costs £750, consists of six 50-minute treatments performed at monthly intervals). There’s just a suffusion of mild heat and a slight intermittent stinging on the second session. There’s no downtime needed, either, although Dabbs recommends no perfume on the hands, no fake tan, no sun exposure and no strenuous exercise for 24 hours because of the effect the heat can have on the capillaries, the smallest of the body’s blood vessels.
It hurt more the second time because Dabbs turned the frequency up a notch, having seen that I didn’t react badly to it. When I say ‘hurt’, what I mean is that the elastic-band pinging sensation intensified.
The big surprise is that you can see the skin getting smoother almost immediately. Well I could, especially on my right hand, which is the one I don’t write with and is therefore less gnarly and wrinkled.
The smoothness may also have something to do with them being slathered in Dabbs’s signature anti-ageing hand serum, followed by her hand lotion, before finishing with some of her nail and cuticle serum for those dry bits around the edges of my thumbnails.
The products are all part of Dabbs’s Home Care Kit (£100, available at margaretdabbs.
co.uk) and contain emu oil, which doesn’t just give the skin a lovely sheen, but also helps with age spots.
Leaving the salon after my second treatment, I can’t stop looking at my hands, rather in the way a child might eye a new pair of shoes. I also become more conscious of other women’s hands, especially at the dinner table.
Nail polish is one thing. Anyone can buy that. But nice, dewy, smooth hands are quite another — and how few of my admirably well-preserved contemporaries have them.
My rINgs have started to make a reappearance and I’ve become as religious about my hands as I am about my face, with pots of Margaret Dabbs’s serum and hand lotion beside my bed.
Is my hand age coming closer to my belly-button age? Do you know, I think it is.
From now on, I have sworn to Dabbs, I will be using her sunscreen on my hands on holiday and maybe even in Britain, which I don’t even bother with for my face. But Dabbs is adamant about the sun’s damage to hands: ‘The sun dehydrates the skin and causes brown skin pigmentation as we get older.’
No more gels now, just oldfashioned varnish, which has to be replaced every week. I’ve bought extra rubber gloves for the kitchen sink (for when holes start appearing in existing ones), and I’m seriously thinking of investing in a pair of those mitts you wear overnight to let cream sink in while you sleep. Not very romantic, I know, but then nor are wrinkled knuckles.
My mother was always obsessed with her hands when we were growing up, forever applying hand cream. At the age of 70something, she has far younger hands than mine, and it makes me rue the fact I’ve only just started looking after my own.
I have another two sessions with Dabbs and am excited to see the magical transformation. But I’m going to have to be religious about the serum, cuticle and hand cream.
In the interim, I have become obsessed with rings by a designer called Irene Neuwirth — and one in particular, a mint-green one edged with tiny diamonds. Way too expensive for the likes of me but, then again, a cocktail ring with my new hands really feels like the way forward.