How can you tell someone’s age? Is it A, their ability to find their way around anything more tech-y than sending an email and using a printer (guilty); B, whether or not they can recite all the lyrics to a Central Cee/Taylor Swift/Kool & the Gang song; or C, how wrinkly their faces are? Not that it matters one bit, but the answer is definitely not “C”. As a 56-year-old woman, I find it impossible to tell anyone’s age between about 25 and 40, so furrow-free are their foreheads, and as for the over 40s, from Sienna Miller to Demi Moore to Naomi Campbell , I am fascinated at just how healthy, beautiful and vibrant women of all ages are looking these days, before thinking, “I want what she’s having.” Women are having it all, and not necessarily in the way that Helen Gurley Brown’s book of the same name intended us to.
Published a mere seven years before the arrival of the now-famous injectable Botox, what we’re actually having is, globally, about £3.5 billion worth of Botox this year alone. It’s not just Botox either: more than 14.
9 million surgical and 18.8 million non-surgical procedures – everything from “tweakments” through to facelifts – were performed worldwide in 2022. One happy side effect of all this? Beauty brands are now teaming up with dermatologists, aesthetic doctors and plastic surgeons in a mutual love fest of the beauty equivalent of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, the results of which might just be giving us our best sk.