Allure magazine A lure?

Yes, that's right: my conclusion, having read the 'editor's letter' available online, is that Allure magazine is ironically simply trying to lure in the grey pound. Do they honestly abhor the concept of anti-ageing? If so, why pick Helen Mirren who has had and admitted to having work done? As far as I'm aware, she's had a facelift and no doubt has a regime of peels, fillers, botox. So, she knows how to use them in moderation to avoid us being able to ridicule her for 'chasing youth', and that, presumably, is what is being applauded.

To me this is a cynical ploy to act as though they are at the forefront of some kind of revolution. I pity anyone who falls for it... No fool like an old fool, eh?

Allure seems like one of the more intelligent woman's magazines but it often looks like it's trying too hard. Until they put non airbrushed non operated non hair extension-ed non injected women on the cover, what is their point? And in any event, let's be frank, we want to see beauty, we don't honestly want to buy a magazine with a 'people of Walmart' poster child on the cover. The simple truth of the matter is, since the dawn of time, youth and beauty, are linked. Not inextricably linked, but there is a fact: looking good once you're older than 30, takes effort. Effort may mean just eating better and drinking water and exercising. But it's certainly not the bloom of youth that comes effortlessly from being, well, in the bloom of youth.

Women over 30 hopefully have the intelligence to know that calling something "anti ageing" doesn't need to considered in the same lexicon of "anti fungal" and "anti virus" and "anti anxiety" as the editor's letter suggests. Buying a cream labelled "anti ageing" doesn't mean you wish you would die young and never age, or that you renounce all wisdom and knowledge accrued with ageing. It means, clearly understood because you're old enough and self aware enough to accept it, that with ageing comes age spots, wrinkles, uneven texture, sagging. Is there any point pretending we want these things?? Is there any point pretending that we don't want to look like we have a fantastic body, fantastic shiny hair, fantastic gleaming even-toned skin? Why create this absurd Emperor's new clothes phenomenon by claiming, after the horse has bolted (a very hasty search of past Allure covers shows that they have never been mindful before - yes, I know, they say they know they were part of the problem...) that suddenly we object to being promised a remedy to these side effects of ageing?

I believe that magazines aimed at teenagers - and more to the point - online blogs and sites and instagram and social media, are a threat to emotional well being and are dangerous. Because when you're young you're very impressionable and vulnerable.But telling a woman old enough to recognise marketing babble, that she will now no longer have to endure the term "anti ageing" is really pathetic. The magazine is not claiming to actually address the true issue: celebrating ageing in all its undisturbed damage (and it is damage, let's not be coy). They want to have their cake and eat it. They will hoodwink us by saying that they champion age, while putting a woman who's had a face lift and who is posing with an undeniably young tattooed model's arm. Why the need to enhance Mirren with this young arm, why not let the age stand alone or be enhanced, with another aged woman? To put Mirren in this setting makes the cover seem diluted and made more palatable; it seems to signal it as a gimmick and a novelty. In fact, what they ought to be doing is accepting that beauty can and does exist in every age, and there is no point in being touchy about the fact that after 45 you certainly won't have the same, ahem, allure, as someone in the 20 year old bracket. Yes, it's probably linked to fertility. Sad but why be in denial. However, an ageing face can be beautiful and inspiring by virtue of its age, with an erstwhile beauty that still shines through proudly.

 Audrey Hepburn. "I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls"

This is not to renounce advances in science, quite the contrary. One is welcome to fight ageing with all one's finances and all one's efforts. The fight will probably be lost - who, seriously, is convinced that these fillers giving an old cheek the same volume as a young one, looks anything other than a blown up old bag? But regardless, the procedures give the patient a sense that she has done all she can and has at least tried to stem the ravages of time... Do not go gentle into that good night...

So don't treat this fight as anything other than "anti ageing" and don't just lead down to an inevitable sickening platitude or euphemism. If it's because you're ashamed to have a cabinet full of labels screaming "anti ageing", that's one thing, and if it bothered me that much I would put masking tape on it or rip the label off... but I would be no less ashamed if the label said 'plumping and smoothing' than if it said 'anti ageing'. If it's because you genuinely think "anti ageing" is an insult, then why not just stick to a slathering of vaseline when your skin feels tight, and let ageing take its unabated course. By 'plumping' for that plumping cream, you've admitted this is a fight against ageing. You're old enough to accept this without a cynical ploy by a magazine taking payments from these companies and taking photo-shopped images from plastic surgery celebrities who swear on paper that this is down to healthy eating. To force brands to rename creams just to spare your feelings?! How about they say they'll no longer run adverts for anti ageing creams unless the celebrity is actually ageing? Or unless the celebrity is actually ageing without surgical intervention? Hmm well that is a step too far, evidently.

That's the trouble with plastic surgery...

The Laws of attraction?


I've recently decided that although I do think cosmetic surgery is fine, it seems to me that no matter how much surgery someone has, they do usually seem to look their age - just smoother. But still clearly their age. And if it is a very expertly pumped up face, they can at best look an indiscriminate age, say, even anywhere between 27 and 50 sometimes - but as soon as they talk and their croaky 50 year old voice emanates, the cat (or rather 'the crone'?) is out of the bag. As I've said before, there is something so admirable about being able to relinquish your youth and let others have their day in the sun and just allow savage Mother Nature to diminish your looks steadily and uninterrupted. Whilst you smile. And occasionally the smile will capture the youthful beauty, just for a second or two. [Horror. I know, not very satisfying, but certainly the most dignified attitude.] But, aside from anti ageing surgery, I always thought that if you had a feature or hangup that so upset you that it seemed only surgery was the answer to a normal, happy life - that was fine too. But now... I have come to think even then it's pretty much doomed...

This story is actually tragic.

Jian Feng sued his wife after the couple’s daughter was born and he didn’t understand why she was very ugly since both he and his wife were good-looking individuals.When he found out his wife had undergone extensive surgery to alter her appearance, he sued her, saying she married him under false pretenses. This photo shows the family all together, and the children don’t look much like their mother, probably because she went to South Korea to drastically change her appearance.
Jian actually won the lawsuit, and was awarded $120,000 in the settlement.

And oddly, I agree with the fact that essentially she has crafted herself into a whole new entity and that it is thus fraud. It's very bizarre that it has been held up as fraud though... As, if you have the cash, you'll always find a surgeon who will carve you into a new creature entirely - indeed, the creature you feel you are 'inside'. And with virtually every successful model and actress having had some kind of surgery, perhaps with that logic they too are fraudsters who shouldn't be landing their hot ticket roles either! At what point does plastic surgery shift from acceptable tweaking to unacceptable fraud?

Much has been made of how cruel the husband is being by publicly decrying his children as ugly, but I suspect the real shock was that they simply did not look like either him or his wife, and that in itself is destabilizing. Breeding in animals is all about selection and mating to enhance certain features - plastic surgery irremediably skews this. I guess it's not so different for humans after all?! Or maybe this proves they didn't marry for true love. Who knows; one can only speculate. Anyway, I bet with a makeup makeover she could have looked a lot better in that way, and after all that level of 'fraud' is still acceptable! They'll be trouble if makeup overload ever became the basis for a successful divorce...

I'd welcome a day when genetic modification meant personal taste was the only thing that mattered, and even better: to look around and not know who is what age or what ethnicity. But the reality is that, much like breeding prize champion pups, we humans appear to need these indicators to decide who is our best bet to associate with. And until that changes, there will always be an unmentionable dark side to plastic surgery: how it can not simply 'improve', but outright deceive.

Olympia Beauty 2012: Reporting back!

Apparently 23,479 people visited over the course of the two days the Olympia Beauty exhibition was on to check out the latest products, treatments and services in beauty, make up and nails. I attend every year and have seen it go from more of a niche professional show to more of a populist free for all... OK I will admit I miss the days when the Olympia Beauty and Professional Beauty exhibitions were more a hidden thing only beauty insiders knew about... especially before Professional Beauty was run by a magazine... in the old days I recall Make Up Forever exhibiting there with foundations £6 a pop and lipglosses £4. [mournful sigh]

Anyway, all this is not to say it wasn't worthwhile. I bought a load of wax and waxing accoutrements; some false eyelashes (the famous Ardell 'wispies'), some Duo eyelash glue (around £4 at the exhibition), some Royal & Langnickel brushes, some backups of my fave Clynol Look at Me smoothing serum (2 for £5!!) some nail polishes by OPI (around a fiver each) and some Seche Vite of course, and a base coat... etc... All just rather dreary basic stuff. There was not the buzz that earlier years' exhibitions have had, and I was rather disappointed by the supposed discounts - e.g New CID cosmetics were showing there, with a 5% discount - please!

Probably the most interesting aspect of the show was the talk I attended by Dr Jain (you might have seen my interview video with him afterwords, here.) The talk highlighted the crossover between the beauty industry and the medical one. Dr Jain very much sees cosmetic surgery as treating real problems: wrinkles, discolourations and sagging: all are as tangible as any other flawed organ of the body. The most interesting picture he showed was of a patient who had been given Botox to treat excessive teeth grinding. The constant clenching literally enlarged her jaw muscles and created a rather masculine square jaw - but post treatment her whole face shape had changed. He also revealed that if a patient's eyelids are drooping to the point where frowning occurs in order to actively open the eyes to see properly, then Botox can be prescribed on the NHS. He mentioned a treatment I'd not heard much about, Sculptra, which lasts around 3 years. He also spoke about his speciality, body contouring. Intriguingly, Dr Jain suggests that the more costly and invasive a treatment, the more seriously a patient will take it, and the more lifestyle changes they will make to maintain it. He seemed very wary of today's disposable pop fame society where cosmetic treatments are trivialised too far. However, he is not denying that modern technology and the prevalence of cosmetic treatments has helped business - he revealed that through Twitter alone he has generated an extra £50,000! As far as celebrity poster girls he chose the notorious Nicole Kidman. I spoke to another cosmetic surgeon recently who opined that Nicole Kidman is now more famous for being the cosmetic surgery warning than anything else! How sad. By contrast, a photo of Brigitte Bardot was shown. As mentioned in one of my previous blog posts, she is one of the very few celebrities who has said adieu to her youth and not fought tooth and claw to resurrect it. I think she should be applauded for that but Dr Jain did suggest several treatments she could have; it would admittedly be tempting to imagine her able to recapture her intense beauty to the fullest that she could... But, as my interview with Dr Jain revealed, he understands that primarily, these 'unnecessary' treatments are in the first place, for psychological reasons.

As in my previous post, I had this old version of the 'intelligent' camera on and it snapped indiscriminately. It's funny as no one has a clue you are taking pictures so I could have included a few with sales peoples' intense and nauseatingly sycophantic 'sales pitch face' but I won't. Instead, here's a brief idea of the show itself:

Generic Geriatric

Getting old is now out of style. Wrinkles are shunned more than ever, and procedures which mimic (yet never quite convince) continue to feign plump dewy skin. More worrying still, perhaps the most distressing aspect of plastic surgery: the trend to efface individuality, ethnicity, and in short, personality.

I have nothing against plastic surgery per se; I knew a friend who grew up so tormented by her (how can I put this delicately) huge banana nose, that she would pretend to have a perpetual cold - a handkerchief functioning as a permanent shield. At 16 she had a nose job, and now is confident and walks with her head held high. Who could condemn such an outcome?

Recently I was watching an interview on TV with Bette Midler and I saw elements of Kylie Minogue. The two look nothing alike naturally, but evidently some generalsing ingredient is at work. Spot the difference:

Clearly as a laudable result of the triumph of feminism combined with general modern ideology, women are no longer expected to hang their boots at 30. Instead, wearing tight leather and indeed thigh high boots is probably now becoming the domain of the over 30s proving they still are desirable - if anything more desirable, they try to insist. Marketing campaigns to appeal to women with cash to spare (professional women or bored housewives - no matter) are encouraged by visions of Sex and the City, or Sharon Stone and Andie McDowell fronting skincare adverts; Kate Moss, Charlize Theron fronting perfume adverts. Gone is the option to resign yourself to fate and nature's cruel finality. If attractiveness has been intrinsically linked to fertility and youth, then fake that and carry on as you were. Of course nature is still a powerful Titan, but science conquers all.

Hacking and stretching and plumping their way towards perfection, we are deluged with celebrities who all blend into each other, particularly as they age. And character-full noses or features which betray too much ethnicity, are ebbed away to present an apparition of Beauty.

In modern times where ostensibly there is an acceptance for global beauty, it appears that the reality is that what we really have come to accept is the perfect mix - caramel skin, westernised features. Too much divergence risks their universal appraisal.

Of course there is a timeless and borderless appreciation for beauty, which has been broadly summarised as long limbs, even features: in short, the mathematical inherent nature of beauty as a calming vision. But ageing has historically been a time for beauty to mellow and be replaced by sober dignity, untempered by the pressures of being attractive. Yet now women expect themselves to remould their beauty and re-instate their youth by force.

- This is a good thing! Our lifespans are longer, therefore by default the stretch of time we feel inclined to be fertile/attractive is accordingly extended. Of course only a bigot would return to the days in which a 40 year old single lady could only be described as a hopeless spinster, and dictate that women should know their place, etc. Nevertheless, the trend for plastic surgery which gives women a mask, is horrifying too. Men in the public eye also succumb to plastic surgery, but women have makeup tricks to easily soften and enhance their surgeon's work, which arguably gives them a dangerous carte blanche.

Unfortunately, big noses and big lips seem to go hand in hand if left to nature...

Noses must be straight, denying its atavistic qualities, and of course hair smooth and preferably lightened....

Skin must be taut, put cheekbones or lip enhancements in for any softness though... And (optional but advised) at this stage, best get a toy-boy to complete the effect.

And if your features are not the ideal man's woman, just shape them until they are...

I actually really miss Jordan's old nose, it was much more elegant. She was so much better before. Oh dear at what she has become...

(Couldn't do a piece on plastic surgery without this one, ouch it hurts to look at that wince. Poor thing.)

And those who believe surgery enables them to distil the best parts of their beauty...

Kim Kardashian used to look like her sister, now she looks like her mum (mystery... ahem)

*Disclaimer: I have no medical training and all opinion is subjective.

All photos from Google.

...What are your thoughts?

The secret to being wrinkle free?

Yes, apparently new research funded by Olay and printed in the June issue of the British Journal of Dermatology has shown that moisturisers are the key – women with well-hydrated faces tend to develop persistent wrinkles more slowly than those with dry skin.

The Proctor & Gamble funded study traces the key between facial expressions and wrinkles. The results showed that an average 28 year old woman with dry skin would have increased the amount of visible wrinkles by 52% by the time she reached 36. However if she had well-hydrated skin, the visible wrinkles would have increased by just 22% over the same time frame. In short, the state of their skin at 28 dictated the rate they would age and "was predicted by the pattern of lines observed with a smiling expression at baseline."

The concept of oily skin and the link between moisturising and ageing is nothing new: "Ageing is all about moisture loss. As skin cells grow older, they lose their ability to keep in moisture and this results in drier skin and the appearance of lines and wrinkles. Dry skin is brittle and cannot hold its shape fully during daily movement. Hydrated skin is much more flexible and able to crease without permanently changing superficially. This is why anti-ageing creams are all based on the moisturising principle."

But the link between dry skin and wrinkles had never been investigated until this study established that repeated facial expression caused persistent wrinkles - which can only be softened by moisturising well in advance. This information hardly seems groundbreaking, the term "laughter lines" has been around a while, after all. But having it all in black and white, even if it is sponsored by an Olay moisturiser, means that there really is no excuse to not moisturise well in advance of your thirties.

However it is interesting that the emphasis is simply on moisture, not "peptides" or other buzz words that make skincare sound so promising. It has been widely noted that these ingredients in any case would need specific lab conditions, or at least the right packaging, to keep the active ingredients balanced and effective. And notwithstanding pipette packaging etc, the fact remains that only prescription retinoids have been shown to work - and if an over the counter remedy really does work, it risks being labelled a medicine, and thus can't be a shelf product advertised and sold in bulk...

As if to corroborate this evidence, Kylie Minogue has sensationally revealed that she has turned her back on the botox and similar treatments which have preserved her youth. Perhaps because botox supposedly causes its own wrinkles. Instead, her secret is nothing more than a humble jar of Ponds Cold cream. Next week: Simon Cowell reveals his mega watt smile is down to Colgate.

Extreme Beauty

After I wrote my piece about Men and Makeup, I asked a few men whether they would sooner have plastic surgery than reach for some foundation and lippy, and they all seemed to agree that surgery was less embarrassing than having a makeup bag. As has often been noted, plastic surgery amongst men has been rising. But if my last blog entry posited the theory that truth and beauty are counterparts, then where does plastic surgery fit in? There is no doubt that plastic surgery done well can heighten beauty, and for anti-aging, often surgery is the only effective solution. Nowadays we are surrounded by TV Makeover shows and magazine and newspaper adverts proclaiming the wonders of plastic surgery for the everyman. Price plans are on hand; Big Brother advocates are featured on the websites to reassure you that yes, it feels great!!

Well this is a tired subject, and I'm sure most people can easily decide for themselves whether invasive surgery is going to enhance their lives. I have a friend who was so miserable about her nose that she pretended to have a perpetual cold so that a tissue could serve as a useful hiding device. Now, after a nose job, she has amazing confidence. But the reason this subject has been playing on my mind is of course the recent passing of Michael Jackson. It strikes me that once again (Heath Ledger comes to mind) people are putting too much faith in prescription medication; believing that if something is 'natural' and equally - if not more so, if something has been processed and approved in a Lab, it's not the equivalent of a street drug. Yet sleeping pills and anti-depressants are serious stuff, they can be fatal! Just like surgery, there is a casual attitude to these instant remedies. Doctors are not always noble enough to draw a distinction between those who are genuinely in need and those who are merely dependent. I have friends who openly admit that they went into the profession for the money, so the naive impression of doctors as saintly saviours is unfortunately often too generous a view.

Michael Jackson clearly had a crippling image problem, which, shocking to see, was indulged in by various surgeons. It is nothing short of heartbreaking to see his metamorphosis. When money is no object, how far would you go to improve? It is hardly surprising that once one 'flaw' is dealt with, others introduce themselves. And once the fear of surgery has been surmounted, how easy it must be to return to the operating table, be put to sleep, and wake up as if in a dreamland, where suddenly you are not yourself.