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Age shall not wither them - Part II continued
by Kira Cochrane - London Guardian - April 7, 2009
When it comes to these procedures, the focus isn't necessarily on rolling back time, but on starting in your 20s or 30s and achieving stasis. Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh (also known as "King Botox") recently said that "preventing the ageing process is better, where possible, than correcting it, non? If a woman comes to me at 35 or 40 and we treat her every three to four months, I can keep her looking that way for 20 years or more."
It's a question of vigilance. Non-invasive procedures appeal to both the famous and the less so because they're not radical but incremental, meaning there's less chance of a sudden, major change in one's looks. The downside is that they have to be regularly updated.
Mountford says hyaluronic acid products require a top-up every six to nine months, so once you embark on these procedures, you enter an ongoing process of revision, your face an endless work in progress. And the cost can be astronomical. While a year's worth of Botox treatments and dermal fillers might cost, say, £2,000 (£1,200 for the fillers, £300-£500 every six months for Botox injections), over 20 years that comes to £40,000. And that's not taking into account either inflation, or the chance that you will be tempted by some of the many other procedures available.
Not that the cost affects the Hollywood set. These new procedures are now so popular that they've been credited with a whole new aesthetic for women in the public eye - a specific "face" shared by many female stars. Where facelifts were often synonymous with the "windtunnel" look - a person's features pulled tight and distorted - the era of injectables is all about filling out the face, replacing lost contours. It's a look that was described in New York magazine last year as The New New Face, with the writer, Jonathan Van Meter, pinpointing "the Mount Rushmore cheekbones, the angular jawline, the smoothed forehead, the plumped skin, the heartlike shape of the face" as defining this aesthetic. That, and volume. Van Meter described these faces as not being "pulled tight in that typical facelift way; they seemed pushed out", while Mountford explains it thus: "If you have a prune, and you tighten the prune, you don't get a grape. You get a tight prune. But if you restore volume back into the prune, you get a grape back."
The sad thing is that, while these cosmetic procedures are supposed to lengthen a performer's career, they often cut them short. We all know of actors who suddenly appear with painfully enlarged lips, weirdly raised eyebrows, or stunned foreheads, and who become very difficult to take seriously. Over the last few years, casting directors have talked about the difficulties they experience as a result, with Richard Hicks, who cast Hairspray, telling Radar magazine that, "There's no way to light them so that they don't look hideous. For the most part, what I find moving is the truth, and once you've had your face worked on, it's often not the same thing." The Wall Street Journal has reported that Warner Bros has had to double its casting staff in Britain and Canada, because Botox is so common in the US. And directors Martin Scorsese and Baz Luhrmann have reportedly complained that the vogue for surgery has undermined actors' ability to express emotion.
What does this culture mean for ordinary women? Well, for one, the beauty standard we're expected to live up to is, specifically, a surgical one - which is complicated by the fact that this is so rarely acknowledged. The result is that we are presented with image after image of women (and, increasingly, men) who are astoundingly unlined, and are forced to compare ourselves with them. If we buy into the idea that these people are "naturally" unwrinkled, the comparison is always likely to come up wanting. As Blum says of the current face of ageing, "I think it puts women on high alert all the time. I think it's just very anxiety-inducing and it causes a certain amount of unhappiness because it's asking people to hyper-scrutinise themselves."
Of course, these images also encourage women to have cosmetic procedures, which can sometimes go horribly wrong. In Britain, the use of cosmetic fillers is largely unregulated, and there are many stories of rogue treatments leaving strange, floating lumps beneath the skin. Nottingham solicitor Paul Balen spoke in the Daily Mail recently about representing six people who have experienced problems with filler treatments: "Clients who have lumps of this stuff erupting out of their faces. Others are dreadfully scarred, or they have strange bags of these filler products appearing under their eyes." In the same article, Karon Kitchener explained that an injectable water-based filler treatment she had to enhance her cheeks had left her with "a moving layer of custard under the skin. Every morning I wake up not knowing how I am going to look." A specialist told her that it would cost £50,000 to correct the damage.
These treatments also involve us buying into a culture that invites us constantly to critique how we look, what we'd like to change, and then holds our happiness just beyond arm's reach. "The cycle of gratification is endless," says Blum, "because what will happen? 'Oh, I get an extra 17 years' - but then what happens at the end of the 17 years? I think, again, it puts people on high alert all the time." She also believes that once you start having cosmetic procedures, it's very difficult to stop. "If you have a good result, you're in it. And if you have a bad result, you're in it, because you have to fix it. So either way it's addictive."
Do we want these to be the terms on which we're allowed to participate in public life? Last year, the author, Charla Krupp, reached the New York Times bestseller list with How Not To Look Old, and argued in interviews that her "whole focus is about the workplace ... [the book is] for the boomer woman who is finding herself looking older than everybody else at work, and realising that she's very vulnerable". While Krupp doesn't favour plastic surgery, she is a strong advocate of non-invasive cosmetic procedures, saying that, "We are so fortunate to be coming of age at a time when we can go to a dermatologist and get Botox, and get the wrinkles in our forehead and the crow's-feet to disappear in a week, 48 hours sometimes." Krupp's outlook is echoed in a series of articles that have recently hit newsstands, which suggest that older people are having cosmetic procedures to help them remain "relevant" in a recession-era workplace. These include one by Judith Newman, for US Marie Claire, who described the blood leaking out of her puncture wounds after liposuction.
It's natural to hold actors and performers up as role models, but to do so in this case is faintly ridiculous, since, of all of us, they are under the most intense pressure regarding their looks. It is understandable that they would bow to the most punishing ideals, but that doesn't mean that the average woman or man should.
Instead, we have to ask ourselves whether we really want to paralyse our facial muscles, wipe away all signs of age and accept that only by looking oddly youthful for as long as possible are we allowed any place in public life. If we do, then we're bending to a viciously sexist and ageist ideal. And, let's face it, obedience is never a good look....link to complete London Guardian article
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