Here’s what my face would look like at 60 without tweakments

Alice Hart-Davis has spent thousands gradually softening her looks over 20 years. But what would she look like if she had aged naturally?

Long, long ago, in a newsroom in central London, I was put onto a story about doctors and nurses offering injections with filler gels to plump up ageing lips, and botulinum toxins to freeze frown lines. The idea made me feel queasy, but I was fascinated. In 1998, few of us knew that there was anything short of a facelift to soften the impact of ageing – apart from fancy face creams, which back then were rarely more than hope in a jar.

Within a few years, I was trying these procedures as well as reporting on them – I’m vain and curious and wanted to see what they could do – and since then, as the “tweakments” industry has grown into a bewildering mass of non-surgical cosmetic procedures to fill that gap between skincare and surgery, I’ve tried everything from lasers and Broadband Light (to clear pigmentation and smooth the skin) to skin-tightening ultrasound, and now spend my time trying to help people understand what these things are and what they can do through my company, The Tweakments Guide. No, I haven’t tried the plasma treatment that worked for Shirley Ballas, but it’s on my list.

All of this has done wonders for my looks. Nothing drastic, but just gradually, incrementally, these procedures soften the impact of the ageing process. I don’t look like someone approaching 60 in May and I’m happy with that. I presumed I’d never know how I’d look if I had aged … until I heard about Auriole Prince, a former FBI-trained forensic artist, and an expert in the way that faces alter as they age. (She now works with companies, using AI-powered software, to show how people’s lifestyle can affect their face in future. What might they look like in 10 years if they carry on drinking half a bottle of wine every night? It’s terrifying.) If I gave her a recent picture and a list of all the procedures I’ve tried over the years, would she, I asked, be able to de-tweak my face?

Absolutely, she said – she’s fascinated by tweakments – and armed with the list, a recent snap of me, and specific advice from aesthetic practitioner Dr Sophie Shotter who has recently added fillers to my face, she went to work. Her finished image shows me with heavier brows and eyelids, hollower, sagging cheeks, proto-jowls, eye bags, dull, rough skin, pigmentation patches… Does it shock me? Not really, it’s all perfectly normal, like me on a really bad day, maybe – but do I want to look like that? No thanks. I’ll stick with the tweakments.

So what have I tried? Tiny bits of this and that at first, but over the years, it’s a ridiculous amount – it’s my job – and you might think, when you read the following list, that I ought to look 25 after all that. But ageing is a multi-factorial process. While our skin is roughening and gathering pigmented age spots, the fat pads in our faces are flattening and sliding south, often gathering under our jawline, and we’re losing bone mass from our skulls, so our facial contours start to look flatter and a bit blurry, too. Each tweak can only do so much – but put together, they’ve allowed me to manage the way I look as I age.