Sisters Lets Cut Out All This Chat About Plastic Surgery
Sunday, October 5th, 2008
LAST WEEK, a TV show redefined what we mean by the Glamorous Grandmother. Where once she wore a starchy satin gown, a string of pearls and a bouffant hairdo much like Yootha Joyce’s magnificent coppery fright-wig in George And Mildred in the 1970s, the new generation, shown through Britain’s Youngest Grannies, wore skinny jeans, crop tops and multi-streaked highlights like Everyone Off The Telly because they were approximately 36 years old, the result of two generations of teenage pregnancy.
A speedy one week later and the Glamorous Grandmother is being redefined once again, a grandma who might be the traditional grandma’s age - over 60 - but who is doing everything in her considerable economic power to look like someone’s 36-year-old daughter. Or even 16-year-old granddaughter. We’ve entered, say cosmetic surgery giants Transform, the era of the Botox Granny, where 20% of Botox clients are now over 60, while breast implants for the same age range are up, as it were, by 31%, with full face-lifts also stretching upwards by 35%.
Their inspirational role models, say the clinic, are the ever-twinkling Dame Helen Mirren (63) and the ever-fabulous Joan Collins (75), right, a staggering irony considering both these women are ever-dwindling voices in the anti-surgery fightback. Dame Helen, famously, turned down an offer of free Botox for the 2007 Oscars where she won her gong for The Queen. “I’m very vain,” she twinkled beforehand, “but I’m not fond of all those needles and scalpels. I’ll try to get away with make-up, jewellery and a nice frock.” She was, of course, the globally swooned-over belle of that year’s ball.
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Joan Collins, meanwhile, ascribes her ever-glowing cartoon glamour to “proper food“, “activity” and “a happy gene” (plus world-class wig), as someone who tried Botox in its infancy, 10 years ago, and hated it. “It was unbelievably painful and it didn’t do anything,” she balked in 2006 before lamenting the now everyday Hollywood procedure. “They stick 300 shots of poison into your face,” she scoffed. “It’s hideous and makes you look like a chipmunk. The plastic surgeons want to make you look young but I don’t want to look young, I just want to look good.”
A doctor over in America, meanwhile, has now decided the ageing process is something we can literally halt with no needles and scalpels involved. “I truly believe ageing is a progressive inflammatory disease that occurs at a cellular level,” averred holistic dermatologist Dr Nicholas Perricone this week, skincare evangelist to the likes of Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman and Julia Roberts. “And as such,” he added, “you can fight it.”
“If you look at Angelina Jolie,” he marvels, “she has these beautiful apples in her cheeks they’re the result of the muscles in the face. Using electro-stimulation I can give anyone this sort of a look.” And that would appear to be that. Follow this advice and 12 weeks later we all wake up and bear an uncanny resemblance to Angelina Jolie.
Those of us with a bloke lying next to us, meanwhile, will find chances are he still bears no resemblance whatsoever to Brad Pitt, as nowhere in any of this week’s anti-ageing pronouncements did anything apply to that curiously unconcerned section of the ageing population known as men.
“Women over 50 already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the Western world,” Germaine Greer reminded us the other year. “As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living.”
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