AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
When people make remarks about your appearance it’s hard to know how to take them sometimes.
Like the former colleague I hadn’t seen for ages who commented: “I’m glad to see you haven’t had any work done.” Did she mean to congratulate me for not having a facelift or did she mean that I looked obviously wrinkly?
Enough to make me start thinking and lifting –not my face – but the lid on the ballooning anti-ageing industry. I am not the only one, with programmes like Kathryn Thomas’ Young Forever: The Death Of Ageing, examining the lengths people are prepared to go to look younger or prolong life, which aired on RTE this month.
Nothing wrong with wanting to look your best.
But some of the fashionable trends in fillers and surgery don’t make me want to try to undo the effects of gravity and the loss of collagen.
Thomas admits to being a fan of Botox and has had bi-annual Botox injections for nearly a decade. After a bit of research, no, I didn’t try having my face injected with Botulinum Toxin, a diluted poison which temporarily blocks nerve signals to muscles which cause wrinkles. I can’t say I am a convert, particularly given the largely unregulated nature of some aspects of the industry.
It’s possible to take a one-day course in an aesthetic training agency here and the next day give Botox injections to fill tear troughs or lips or whatever. Treatments don’t come cheap, starting at €350 at a centre near me for a 45-minute session.
And it seems Irish customers are happy with the results, with the Botox boom here having grown fourfold since 2019.
Employees at AbbVie’s Westport, Co. Mayo plant, which is the global manufacturing hub for the world’s entire supply of Botox, must be pretty happy too. The plant, where profits grew by 25% last year, employs more than 1,600.
Enthusiasm for some treatments can go too far though, like the appearance of a woman I saw in a hairdressers’ in Italy whose filled lips pouted further than her nose in profile. “Americana,” said my stylist, as though that explained everything. Perhaps it does, the global anti-ageing market, where America is the biggest consumer, is expected to reach $80bn by the next decade.
Face-lifts used to involve travel, to the US perhaps or to South Africa where ‘scalpel safaris’ were popular (you came back with a tan and tales of the Big Five, looking fantastic after the post-op bruises have faded). Now there are a number of cosmetic surgery clinics in Ireland. A deep plane facelift which involves ‘gently repositioning and tightening underlying face structure and removing excess skin’ is available at the Eden Clinic. The procedure is done under local anaesthetic, no hospital stay required, 10-14 days off work afterwards is advised, costs €8,500, or you could have a Blepharoplasty (eyelift ) for € 2,000. Some people still travel for nips and tucks, where, in the Czech Republic for instance, prices are about half the Irish rate.
The French have a saying ‘Il faut souffrire pour etre belle’ (beauty is pain), a sometimes dangerous affair we have been flirting with for centuries from the use of toxic lead-based cosmetics for a pale complexion to deadly Nightshade taken for a wide-eyed look. While I have no argument with treatment that helps men and women look and feel better, it’s worrying that some people are turning to fillers and surgery at increasingly younger ages. Promoting age anxiety to the point that teenagers in the bloom of youth are using fillers is unacceptable.
Maybe social media – home to selfies and influencers – has a tendency to make us trade too much on our looks, rather than having a holistic view of ourselves as people. It’s personality that gives that inner glow which is attractive in a way that treatments can’t create. We now talk about biological age – how well you are wearing physiologically – and the good news is that you can be a decade or two younger than your chronological age, helped by exercise, diet and sleep and regimes that don’t cost a cent.
We are living longer now, a shame to blight that gift of longevity with prejudice about how ageing looks.
I like the quote by US architect Frank Lloyd Wright: “The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.”
