It’s easy to assume, reading fashion magazines, that “everyone” lives in a high-maintenance, metropolitan world where “everyone” has injectables. This isn’t true. In the real world, normal women either don’t give them a thought or, usually in early middle age, start thinking about them with intense curiosity. Which is as it should be: we’re talking about injecting your face with stuff. Doing it in the first place is not a decision to be taken lightly.
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Often the assumption is that having things pumped into your face is vain and tragic, and I can see why: there is something truly piteous about wanting to hold onto youth. I feel that very strongly when, say, an elderly woman decides she needs the fawn-like eyes and pulpy lips of a 20-year-old, but I don’t feel it at all when she thinks: “Ugh, I don’t like this jowliness. I wonder if there’s anything I can do about it?” It’s all a question of context, and of sane expectations. There is nothing wrong with wanting to look the best version of your age that you can. Equally, of course, there is nothing wrong at all with doing nothing. Doing nothing is a mark of supreme, enviable confidence.
The only people who say “Oh, but I love a wrinkly face, like a lovely old apple on the turn, just before it actually goes mouldy — so expressive! Every line tells a story” are young women. You don’t hear many 60-year-olds going: “It’s hard to choose, but I think this crease — well, I say crease, I really mean crevasse — between my brows is my absolute favourite. It’s magical. It can make me look angry even when I feel serene. Mind you, the marionette lines do that too. They drag my mouth right down, so that’s pretty cool. And see these other lines? They’re from when I smoked 40 a day. I love those lines. The only sadness is that they aren’t deeper.” Nobody says that. So point one is: you are not allowed to judge other people for how they feel about their face, nor are you allowed to impose your own mimsy narrative onto faces that aren’t yours. If a woman who has felt reasonably attractive all her life isn’t yet ready for jowls, well, that’s up to her. It’s her face.
The good Botox just looks like your friend is recently back from holiday and sleeps 12 hours a night
Is it vain? Sure, a bit. I mean, so is brushing your teeth and wearing deodorant. Everybody is interested in a degree of grooming. We try and wear nice clothes, we don’t cut our hair with shears, we whack on a bit of lipstick now and then: we make an effort to appear reasonably presentable, because it makes us feel good. It’s not a big deal. I would say that having a casual relationship with injectables is an extension of all that. A fairly extreme extension — though if it’s done well, it never looks extreme — but an extension all the same. Sometimes, you are just not ready to look cross/disapproving/knackered/ultra-wrinkly all the time at the age of 40. There are things you can do about it, and there we are.
Now, “if it’s done well” is the key to all this. If it’s done well, nobody can tell you have had it done. A friend once said to me: “I don’t know anyone who’s had Botox.” She was in fact sitting at lunch with three out of four of her friends who had it regularly. The rest of the conversation went along the lines of, “What? What? Let me see. Where? But your forehead moves!” Because the only Botox anyone notices, this friend included, is the bad Botox: the frozen, sheeny, egg-like forehead; the expressionless, vacant face; the eyebrows that have shot up and now look like they belong to Ming the Merciless. That’s the Botox nobody wants; the Botox that messes up people’s faces for months at a time and forces them to grow a fringe. The good Botox just looks like your friend is recently back from holiday and sleeps 12 hours a night. You don’t notice it as anything more than that. I should add that the women who have the good Botox/fillers aren’t necessarily having lunch somewhere smart wearing a ton of make-up and a pristine blow-dry. They are much more likely to be milling about doing ordinary things, bare-faced, causing you to think: “God, she looks great. She must have incredible genes.” Maybe. Genes certainly help. But maybe not.
I go to Dr Frances Prenna Jones (another trusted option is Dr Michael Prager). I’ve been going to her since I was 47; I’m now 50. Prior to that, I went a handful of times to some other doctors, with varying degrees of success and one massive failure, when my forehead sort of fell down into my eyes, like the collapse of the coastal shelf, as a result of an excessive dosage of Botox. I looked both Neanderthal and micro-eyed. (This can, and does, happen. Always say that you favour an ultraminimalist approach.)
It’s to do with trust, and I trust Dr Prenna Jones, partly because she herself looks great. This is not something that is universally true in this line of work. If you are a bit spooked by the way your potential doctor looks — like a pink baby, or a boiled egg, or a trophy wife on the turn, or a teenage girl even though he is a man, don’t proceed. You really need a shared aesthetic. Also, if you feel, “This person doesn’t get me or my life at all,” go to someone else (and a good doctor should ask about your life. It is completely relevant). I’ve worked out that I personally feel more comfortable with a woman. A man says: “I could make you look like Ava Gardner.” A woman is practical and pragmatic. She says: “We just need to soften this up a bit, and maybe give this a hoick.”
I go to see Dr Prenna Jones on a rather vague basis: sometimes three times a year, sometimes less, never more. I like her enormously and I like that she takes a scholarly, rather nerdy, anatomical approach. A bad practitioner (you can do a day course in administering this stuff) might say: “Right, so there’s a big crease. I will inject directly into it and it will be gone.” It won’t: it’ll make you look awful. A good doctor understands which muscle movements cause the crease and inject accordingly (lots of tiny jabs, usually, rather than one big one, often nowhere near the crease).
When I went to see her last week, I hadn’t been for a year and a half. This is partly because she’s very good, and I don’t feel that I need frequent top-ups. Her work is the handmade shoes of injectables: you might need the odd resole, but you can generally hobble along for ages. It’s also because I love what she does, but not enough to obsess over it. She doesn’t make me look so different that I start panicking when the treatments wear off, and I think that’s what you want. Having said that, she can, and does, carry out more hardcore procedures that are completely transformative, like a deep facial peel or fat-dissolving injections. I’ve never had them. I like a quick, relatively painless tweak, but I am not, and cannot imagine myself ever being, in the market for the seriously invasive stuff or anything involving lengthy downtime (ie, how long it takes before you can leave the house again). I know the limits of my vanity. Also, I live with a man who doesn’t really notice. He’ll say something flattering — “You’re looking really well” — but it would never be: “Ah, I see it’s because your jawline seems marginally tighter.” I always think women lie when they say they wear complicated underwear for themselves: it’s for sex, obviously. The face stuff, though, is not for sex. It’s primarily for you. It’s so you can look in the mirror and think, “Well, OK, I’m clearly knocking on, but things could be a lot worse.”
I have Botox, not very much, and less for wrinkles (this is the reward of having a fat face) than to counter tiny, specific areas where there has been a loss of density. I also have fillers in the corners of my mouth, to counter a general downward trend and, again, to counter thinning skin. The specifics rely on absolute trust: they change minutely every time I go. I basically turn up with my face, she has a look and does what she thinks needs doing, and not an iota more. The Botox doesn’t hurt; the fillers, despite the application of anaesthetic gel, nip a bit at the time, just about behave until you get home and then bruise and hurt like mad for a couple of days, but that’s subjective and everyone’s skin and tolerance are different. Incidentally, not everyone who thinks they need Botox and/or fillers does, in fact, need them: often, the issue is more to do with the texture, surface, tone or elasticity of the skin, which are best treated with lasers.
There are no magic cures, is the truth of it. We’re all ageing. I like ageing. I like the lines I have. And the ones I don’t like, well, I don’t even remember them.
