BODY LANGUAGE
Catherine Bennett
With characteristic determination, Mary Archer has exempted herself from the Orwellian rule to the effect that everyone, at 50, “has the face he deserves”. At the age of 57, Archer would seem to have, instead, the face she has bought. After 36 years as Jeffrey Archer’s helpmeet, an experience that might reasonably have been expected to leave her with skin like a rhino hide, Archer looks no more than a carefree 47 or 48. “There is no doubt that she has had surgery,” a plastic surgeon told the Sunday Mirror.
Today beauty correspondents eagerly remind their readers that it seems senseless for wrinkled women to waste the opportunity to reinvent themselves as young, pouty and unlined. Why hang on to your nose to spite your face?
If you have the misfortune to be over 30, for example, You (Britain) magazine’s glamour editor Normandie Keith proposes a procedure called fat transfer surgery or, as she prefers to put it, “a little shift and shimmy”. Last week she described watching a London-based surgeon as he “harvested” fat from her friend’s thighs then reinjected it into her friend’s face. Half way through the operation Keith examined the difference: “I was amazed; half my girlfriend’s face looked 18 years old and the other thirty-something laughter lines and crow’s-feet had vanished and in their place was the smoothest, glowing orb … Jealous does not even begin to describe how I felt at seeing this glory.”
Of course, enthusiasts of Botox injections remind us, there is no need to wait until your 30s. As Dr Patrick Bowler of the British Association of Cosmetic Doctors says: “Age is not always a qualifying factor for these treatments.” Young women regularly approach him, flourishing pictures of their hideously aged mothers and begging him to save them from the same fate. Proving his point was a 23-year-old who has recently had her first set of Botox injections to erase “fine lines” on her forehead.
That the long-term consequences of regular muscle paralysis which is how Botox achieves its smooth, expressionless results are unknown, as are the cumulative effects of regular acid peels, collagen injections and many of the other treatments currently promoted, appears to be a negligible deterrent, even after the not-very-distant horrors of leaking breast implants.
Then again, most articles about these minor forms of surgery now present them as marvellously quick and non-invasive, cheap and safe: the long-awaited democratisation of once-exclusive treatments. Not only do you no longer have to be a rich Hollywood star to get your face professionally rejuvenated, you don’t even have to be old! You don’t even have to have any wrinkles, jowls or a big nose! You can be beautiful, and still need treatment! In other areas of medicine, this kind of thinking is likely to be diagnosed as dysmorphia, a patho- logical condition.
As always in plastic surgery, the most persuasive justification for intervention is that we are all, increasingly, judged on our appearance. Why let unsightly wrinkles devastate your career? You do not have to be Madonna (regular Botox) or Kylie (suspected bottom lift) to be aware that, these days, fading looks are a disadvantage in every profession.
“Well, isn’t that a great sadness?” comments Iain Hutchison, a leading maxillofacial surgeon. “There is this worship of the cult of youth and of banality and of appearance above all else, appearance above substance.” Not that he disputes the premium placed on looks.
Research by the British charity he started, the Facial Surgery Research Foundation, recently confirmed that “people are judged continuously on their facial appearance.” Not only attractiveness, but qualities such as friendliness, intelligence and honesty are all seen as deficient in the plain or damaged, enhanced in the good-looking.
I worry more about the day, years and years from now, when the beneficiaries of all this facial maintenance wonder if the time has finally come to stop. How will they feel on the day their face collapses? Or does it never end? Maybe they are meant to go on forever, still signing up for their peels and injections as, inside, their hip-bones crumble and their arteries harden and reason gives way to dementia. What a triumph for plastic surgery it will be if, 50 years from now, the residents of old peoples’ homes are indistinguishable give or take the odd walking frame and wheelchair from participants on a Club 18-30 holiday. Or to put it another way, what a life-long rip-off if they aren’t.