Beauty bible

Not happy with your neck? These treatments can help

Celia Walden saves your neck

IN HER HILARIOUS tirade about confronting ageing, I Feel Bad About My Neck, Nora Ephron advises her readers to start hiding their necks at 43. Now, I don’t like numbers, especially those that pertain either to bodily circumferences or my time on earth, but the one currently attached to me is 42. And that makes a girl think – about necks.

I’ve barely given mine any consideration over the years, quite content to let it carry on doing its thing of, you know, keeping my body attached to my head. But it turns out that a lot of women obsess about necks. The girlfriend I had thought had a thing about silk scarves recently admitted to feeling so disgusted by the state of her 50-year-old neck that she keeps them on even in the comfort of her own home; and an older work colleague with a perfectly fine stem has started hiding hers in a slightly alarming series of Mao-collared shirts.

Surely we now live in an age when we can just fix this stuff ? Isn’t the only point of being alive in 2018 that you no longer have to walk around with a neck that looks like, as the scarf-wearer poetically puts it, ‘a snakeskin accordion’? According to Harley Street’s Dr Viel that’s absolutely the case – largely thanks to the advent of radio-frequency treatments, which can smooth fine lines and wrinkles, remodel collagen and enhance circulation using electromagnetic radio waves. ‘Radio frequency has seen great results in neck rejuvenation,’ he tells me. ‘And for more extreme cases I might recommend a neck lift (platysmaplasty).’

Then again, who wants to get involved in the ‘plasty’s? Particularly when there are so many non-invasive treatments out there – another brilliantly effective one being the Velashape Lift, which combines infrared, bipolar radio frequency and vacuum suction to precisely heat the skin tissue and remodel collagen and elastin. It feels like being slowly strangled by someone who has very hot hands, but the person who does it, a delightful man called Marco, is so charming that you soon start to enjoy it, and the result is well worth a slight amount of discomfort.

‘Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth,’ Ephron insisted in 2006. If only she were alive to see what good fibbers they too would become.