WILL COSMETIC MEDICINE MAKE YOU LOOK YOUNGER?

Fantasy Football

Sign up to our classic game. Get three teams for just £6
Navigation - link to other main sections from here
Skip Navigation

Times Online
Simon Barnes
Opening quote
The worst decision sport ever made was to start testing for drugs
Closing quote

Simon Barnes

Send your views

* News
* Comment
* Business
* Money
* Sport
* Life & Style
* Travel
* Driving
* Arts & Ents

* Archive
* Our Papers
* Site Map

* Career & Jobs
* Education
* Food & Drink
* Health
* Property
* Court & Social
* Women
* Men
* Related Features

Where am I?
Home

* Life & StyleWomenBeauty

MY PROFILE SHOP JOBS CLASSIFIEDS

From The Sunday Times
August 10, 2008
Will 'cosmetic medicine' make you look younger?
A 38-year-old woman tries 80 injections, gets laser treatment and spends £2,500 to restore her looks. But does it work?
Kate Spicer before her treatments (Left) and after (right)
Kate Spicer

A gory photograph has been my "look at this freak" party piece for most of the summer. It's of a glassy-eyed woman, drugged up on Xanax and morphine, with eyeballs that appear to be weeping bloody tears, her skin red, oozing and bruised, and her eyelids glossy and raw like tuna tartare. When I showed it to my dad, with a jocular, "Look at this, euw, gross out, tee-hee," he was visibly disturbed. He is a surgeon, used to sicko operating-room comedy, but he did not find this funny. "I can imagine some silly actress doing this, but not my daughter," he said.

When, in the name of research for a television documentary, I allowed myself to dip a toe into the murky waters of cosmetic surgery, I thought I would barely get my feet wet. We decided to go to America, as it is a culture broadly more accepting, open and enthusiastic about cosmetic enhancement than over here. I thought I might have a bit of Botox, make my excuses and leave. Actually, in the course of interviewing some of the country's top practitioners, I got wet right up to my eyeballs, quite literally.

Previously, I had found cosmetic surgery curious, fascinating, not for me. Instinct told me it formed the deepest, darkest recesses of the misogynistic capitalist system that is the beauty industry. I dye and remove my hair; I have pedicures; someone else plucks my eyebrows. Slicing yourself up: ethically wrong, economically crippling and likely to make you look weird.

"Cosmetic medicine" is the best, if contradictory, catch-all term to describe the vast range of treatments available today, including lasers, peels, injectables, legally and scientifically dubious embryonic stem-cell work and hormone therapy, as well as the scalpel.

NOTE: COSMETIC MEDICINE IS POPULAR IN THE WORLD OF PLASTIC SURGERY.

The noninvasive procedure - anything that is knife-free - is where the market is heading. In America, cosmetic-surgery procedures have increased by 140% in the past 10 years and noninvasive procedures by 740%. In the UK, the market more than tripled in the space of five years, and the vast majority of procedures are noninvasive.

These are entry-level procedures and they're unintimidating. They can can perk up your face and are reassuringly temporary - costing as little as £120; a decent face-lift is £8,000, and if you don't like it, you're stuffed. Having some cringingly raw photos of my unmade-up, 38-year-old, lived-in face presented to a panel of beauty-industry critics, who pointed out what made me look ugly/old/ordinary, brought me a little closer to the culture of what I can only call extreme self-improvement.

By the time I arrived in New York, I was interested, wondering what I could do to myself. In such a high-risk game, you only want the big-name dermatologists or esteemed aesthetic surgeons working on your face - and I had access to all of them. Clearly, my personal quasi-feminist standpoint, my moral objection to it all, was careful avoidance. I wasn't principled - I had just swerved the issue for cultural and financial reasons.

We nailed an appointment with Dr Fredric Brandt. Brandt is Madonna's guy - he's hot. They also call him the "baron of Botox" - he buys more Botox than any other person in the world. Him, the "don of needles", he would work on my face.

But, like a kid in a sweet shop, I couldn't wait. While I was interviewing a Park Avenue cosmetic podiatrist, I got chatting to her colleague, a radiologist called Dr Everett Lautin. "Diagnosing" all the flab, sag, wonkiness and hollows in my face, he prescribed some needlework. As a radiologist, he is not qualified to work with a knife, but he can stick as many needles in it as he likes. Any qualified doctor can administer injectables in America, even a radiologist. (In the UK, the regulations are even looser - anyone can inject Botox provided they are "overseen" by someone authorised to prescribe it. Soon, if the government has its way, anyone will be able to administer non-surgical lasers: doctors, nurses, nail technicians, window cleaners - anyone.) The point being, Lautin is no Brandt. But he had a knowingly buffoonish air, which was a refreshing change from the smooth-talking charm-meisters, with the photos of their shock-and-awed, "all my own work" wives on their desks.

As we talked, Lautin was totally comfortable lampooning the Botox junkies, the women who aren't happy unless their faces are in permanent rictus. They say you choose your cosmetic doctor based on empathy - Lautin talked like James Stewart. As we chatted about the importance of keeping it subtle - the "European look" - I decided he was just the kind of guy I wanted injecting poisons and volumising materials into my face.

Impatient, I asked him if he could do me now. Checking his watch, he said things were tight, as he had a cocktail party to go to, but he would squeeze me in.

Forty minutes, £1,250 and 50 injections of Botox and Sculptra later, he dashed off. I went home for a much-needed medicinal gin. Anyone who describes injectables as painless may have had a little light Botox around the eyes. What I had was rough and painful.

The following morning, as I lay in the chair of "Madonna's guy", I felt bruised. Brandt is jaw-dropping evidence of what happens when cosmetic dermatologists get high on their own supply - less 59-year-old man, more freaky porcelain doll in appearance. Did it put me off? Did it hell.

I told him I'd seen Lautin (he spat to his PR, "Why didn't anyone tell me she'd let a radiologist loose on her face?"), and then waited for him to refuse me. Did it put him off? Did it hell.

Another 20 injections. Being injected so repeatedly is like being stung by a swarm of wasps. This time it was Botox into my jawline and Restylane into my top lip; the latter hurt a lot. What was I thinking? Every time the needle penetrates your skin, you feel stupid, vulnerable and assailed, but, underneath, there is the corollary to the suffering: the prospect of looking good. Even though I looked an absolute wreck - bruised everywhere, swollen, green around the gills - I was riding high, looking forward to seeing the effects and buzzing off pain-induced adrenaline.

The truth is, expensive face creams can't change the way you look, but surgery and injections can. Morally, ethically, financially, there is something dangerous and fun about playing with your appearance. It's un-PC and it's body modification - but so is a tattoo, ear piercing, leg waxing, hair dyeing. They like to sell this stuff as personal style. Where this burgeoning industry comes from, however, is a sad and unhealthy place. Many of the doctors I met are serving career women, for whom looking fresher and younger is not about vanity and a terror of ageing, but more about professional necessity.

Dr Daniel Sister, a cosmetic doctor near my home in west London, says: "I deal with everyone from lawyers and accountants to bankers and prostitutes. Most of my clients work. Women in their thirties start worrying that younger women will steal their jobs."

This is terrible and depressing. But it's incredibly uplifting, getting out of bed and going bleary-eyed to the mirror and seeing - "What's this?!" - a picture of health staring back. It's a pleasant surprise, daily. There is research to suggest that Botox injections can treat depression: if you can't make miserable expressions, you cannot experience the emotions so intensely.

Things only got weirder after we moved on from playing with needles in NY, to LA, where we flirted with knives and lasers. I was on the rollercoaster, it was a thrilling ride and, my, there was a hell of a lot more of it to go before I was going to get off.

It was pathetic how quickly I went from someone determined to embrace ageing with some grace, to someone who was willing to let a fairly inexperienced doctor remove some fat from my backside, take it to a lab, separate out the stem cells and then inject it back into my ageing, sunken cheeks, up through the inside of my mouth, while also, seeing as he is up there and has got me under a general anaesthetic, getting the knife out and "redraping" the sagging skin under my eyes like a pair of old curtains.

The fat transfer didn't happen. A chance phone call at the last minute, telling me that nobody should work on me following the Sculptra injections, made me call off the procedure that could have left me looking ridiculous. Looking like a freak, I always thought, would keep me away from cosmetic enhancement, but in America, you meet countless women who look weird, yet think they look great. I reckon it's easy to join them. Perhaps I already have.

When you monkey about with what nature intended, things do go wrong. The Restylane in my top lip has slipped - there's a funny lump that shouldn't be there. Since the Fraxel laser therapy on my eyes (performed in LA by Dr Persky), the aforementioned tuna tatare has faded and, certainly, my eyes look less baggy, but, still, seven weeks on, they are a weird brown colour. My forehead is glassy and does not move. A glassy brow is not considered good Botox, but I now like this egg-like badge of self-inflicted paralysis. I may go back for more.

NOTE: EFFECTS ARE DIFFERENT FROM EVERY PERSON.

People have commented, constantly, on how well I look, and it started the moment I walked out of Brandt's office, when the sound man told me: "You're a real Manhattan girl now. You look awesome." Even Anna Davies, the serious, Oxbridge-educated, bluestocking director, liked my lips. My best mate, P, who I had thought would be mildly disgusted, said: "You look great. I haven't seen you like this since the mid-1990s."

Once you are inside, it's hard to get out. At a certain point, the Botox won't be effective enough, and it will be time for an eye-lift, a neck-lift, a face-lift and so on. If you want to be dramatic about it, you could say that injectables are the weed to surgery's heroin. More pragmatically, if you're going to play the self-improvement game, you had better accept you're in it for life. Boob jobs last only 10 years; eye jobs require volumising materials to be injected regularly into the under-eye area to stop you looking hollow.

I'm already nervous about the moment, in a month or so, when my face starts to drop, and it'll be back to saggy old me, or, more to the point, back to the doctor's chair for another few shots of happy in my face, or another knuckle-bitingly painful procedure. I know, deep down, it's wrong. But, damn, I look good at the moment.

The Ugly Face of Beauty will be on Channel 4 on August 24

What I had done

Botox: I had about 50 injections from forehead to jaw to iron out wrinkles and sharpen definition of a sagging jawline. Mild bruising persisted for a week. Will last a few months. Cost: £1,000.

Sculptra: A dermal filler developed to make Aids sufferers less gaunt. I had about 12 injections in my cheek and lower-eye area to replace youthful shape and volume. My face was swollen for several days, and I had deep bruising on my cheeks for more than a week. Three or four subsequent treatments are required for optimum results; will last two years. Cost: £400.

Restylane: A dermal filler. I had about 10 injections in my top lip to straighten it out and add volume. My lips were tender and sore for a day and the beads of filler made me constantly lick my lips in confusion over the alien substance. Cost: £400.

Fraxel Re:pair: A laser over my entire eye area to remove excess skin, refine appearance and stimulate collagen production. Seriously damaged for two days, I sat in a darkened room, smothered in Vaseline, wiping my eyes every three hours (even through the night) with vinegar water. It never really hurt, however. Subsequently, tenderness and soreness for two weeks, then for three months I must never allow my eyes to make contact with the sun unprotected. Could last 10 years. Cost: £750.

What I didn't have done

Fat stem-cell transfer: Injections of your own adipose stem cells into the cheek and lower eye area to replace lost volume and stimulate the natural production of collagen. It is painful, you cannot fly for a week and you must quietly sit in a room taking lots of pills.

Lower-eye blepharoplasty: Surgical removal and rearrangement of skin, so that bags and wrinkles are erased. Again, it involves no flying and quietly sitting in a darkened room. Minimal scarring. For best aesthetic results, a maintenance programme is required to fill out hollows under eyes. Cost (with fat transfer): about £4,500.

* Have your say

Which photo is before and which after all the cosmetic effort?

M Khan, Peterborough, UK

Isn't the photo on the left simply the unmade-up woman on the right?

She should have gotten a good night's sleep and a decent makeover.

Sad really.

G P S, Milton Keynes,

Twenty years or so ago if someone wanted more than one cosmetic surgery they were refused and referred for psychological counselling. Now one surgery is just the beginning ...

Ming S, Auckland, New Zealand

I hate to tell you this, but frankly you look absolutely no different than before. Neither better nor worse.

M.L. Owens, Brooklyn, USA

* Read all 4 comments

o Have your say

Have your say



300 characters left

* Name

* Email

* Town

Country

* Required

Remember me

* Terms and conditions

* Print
* Email
* Post to del.icio.us
* Post to Fark
* Post to Yahoo!
* Post to Digg

Also in Beauty

* Will 'cosmetic medicine' make you look younger?
* The best duty-free beauty buys
* Vanity Case: Ethical haircare

Also in Women

* Now women really are on top
* Chick lit: the reality
* Salon spy: Tantrum, Kings Road, London

Times recommends

* There's only pain in comfort eating
* Camper van man week 5: Weston-super-Mare to Salcombe
* Aunt Sally: I am trapped in my marriage

Top five features

* Tad and Molly: is it wise to live together before you get married?
* 'Go while you can; the enemy's coming': Guernsey under German rule
* I had sex with my brother but I don't feel guilty
* Why it's rubbish being single
* Intimacies: Vanessa-Mae

Problem solver

What's your beauty issue?
Video
Shiny Image
How to get shiny hair
Make-up for men
Noel Fielding

As Superdrug launches its range of male only cosmetics, we celebrate some pioneers of boy beauty
Slide Show
Vanity Case
Helen Brown Columnist
open quote mark The latest stylists to turn their hand to shampoos are offering something different: ethical haircare for the masses close quote mark
More...
Helen Brown

* Post a comment

Spas & Lifestyle
Kasbah Tamadot Spa, Morocco
Five spas for perfect preening
Bridal make-up
Skincare: Make sure your skin is well-cleansed and nourished the night before the big day. Neal?s Yard's Palmarosa Purifying Facial Mask (£20) will help the complexion; follow with its legendary White Tea Eye gel (£20) and your usual moisturise (Scope)

How to create a flattering look for your big day
Slide Show
Video: Bathing in chocolate
Japanese spa
A Japanese spa of culinary delights
MOST READ
MOST COMMENTED
MOST CURIOUS
Most Read
Skip Most Read

Today

* Hundreds die as Georgia war escalates
* Top 100 Olympic athletes
* Georgia pulls troops out of South Ossetia...
* How Georgia fell into its enemies' trap

MOST COMMENTED
Skip Editor's Pick

Today

* Georgia says Russian tanks mean 'war' in...
* Georgia 'downs two Russian warplanes' as...
* Russia and Georgia move to brink of war
* Review interview: Richard Dawkins

MOST CURIOUS
Skip Most Curious

Today

* Paris Hilton hits back at John McCain...

* Graduate Gemma McCoyd spurns £100,000...

* Smugshots special: bonus galleries

* Mystery of the unknown artist who...

Focus Zone
swimmer
London Triathlon:

Follow our three athletes' progress in their preparations for the London Triathlon, and pick up training tips and more
Dr Zhivago
Top 100 Films:

Enjoy screenings of all the classic films you love, plus take advantage of two-for-one tickets
A family canoeing on a lake
Sport Safety :

We explore leisure activities that are safe and suitable for all of the family
Focus zone, pets, 100x100
Perfect Pets:

Times Online's new TV show helps you make the right decisions for your pet
Daniel Craig
James Bond:

Read our exclusive 100 Years of Fleming and Bond interactive timeline, packed with original Times articles and reviews
ba business travel clouds
Business Travel:

The latest travel news plus the best hotels and gadgets for business travellers
previous next

* London Triathlon
* Top 100 Films
* Sport Safety

* Perfect Pets
* James Bond
* Business Travel

Popular Searches on Times Online
books | chess | currency converter | fantasy football | fashion | formula 1 | horoscopes | mortgages | olympics | pensions | podcasts | property | recipes | redundancy calculator | sudoku | travel news | weather forecast | wine

Shortcuts to help you find sections and articles
Why play is so important for kids
Services

* Designer Discounts
* Child Trust Funds
* Dating

* Restaurant Offers
* IFA Search
* Business Directory

Luxx
The Times Luxx

A treasure trove of baubles, booty and stylish quests
The Proms
Special
Promcast

Classical music at its best
dating
Encounters
Dating

Click start your love life
Young boys jumps into water in front of fishing boats, docked in Calais
AD FEATURE
Fun in France

Great holidays for families
Classifieds
Cars
Jobs
Property
Travel
Cars
Skip Cars of the Week

Ferrari 360 Modena 2dr

X/2000
£46,700

BMW M3 Convertible 2dr

08/2008
£56,850

Mercedes-Benz CL500 AMG

2008
£75,990

Car insurance

Great car insurance deals online


* Search for more cars and bikes

Jobs
Skip Jobs of the Week
Reports Officers


MI6
London
Sales Director

To £150k basic / £200k+ OTE
RM
Oxfordshire
Finance Director

£ Six Figure Package
Experian
Nottingham
Finance Director

circa £70k
Central Office of Information
London

* Search more Jobs

Properties
The First Group

Great Dubai Investment Opportunities
from £89,950
The Gardens @ Riverside Quarter Luxury Appts in Wandsworth

Beautiful Gardens w/ stunning Thames Views

Ajman UAE (next to Dubai): Prices set to double in 18 months!

Studios £33K, 1 Beds £60K, 2 beds £79K

Barclays

Mortgages, bank acc & money transfers to help you buy abroad

* Search for more properties

Holidays
Skip Travel of the Week

Explore the Hawaiian Islands

on this Once in a Lifetime 7 night Cruise
£POA

APT River Cruising

Christmas Cruises
From only £995pp

The Silk Route

A Journey of a Lifetime with The Captain's Choice Tour
£10,475

Travel insurance

Great travel insurance deals online


* Search for more holidays

Place your advert now

Search Ad Reference:

Where am I?
Home

* Life & StyleWomenBeauty

* Contact us
* Back to top

* News
* Comment
* Business
* Money
* Sport
* Life & Style
* Travel
* Driving
* Arts & Ents

Contact our advertising team for advertising and sponsorship in Times Online, The Times and The Sunday Times. Globrix Property Search - find property for sale and rent in the UK. Visit our classified services and find jobs, used cars, property or holidays. Use our dating service, read our births, marriages and deaths announcements, or place your advertisement.

Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.

This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions. Please read our Privacy Policy.To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from Times Online, The Times or The Sunday Times, click here.This website is published by a member of the News International Group. News International Limited, 1 Virginia St, London E98 1XY, is the holding company for the News International group and is registered in England No 81701. VAT number GB 243 8054 69.