Why I'm (semi-) seriously contemplating a facelift...
But until then… details on the brand new tweakment I just tried (one designed to counter O Face), and also: the best tweak for beginners
A colleague - early 40s, holding up brilliantly, I thought - got a bloody facelift last year. She formally unveiled the results at an extremely boozy pre Christmas journo bash. Gotta say, it looks spectacular. Not fake, not overdone at all, just: fresh, snatched, good .
“You’re an inspiration,” I said, half-cut, half-joking, as she turned her jawline hither and thither so I might admire its newly embellished and highly convincing tautness.
She looked at me, drunk-earnestly. “I am, Polly,” she sighed, as if it was quite the responsibility. “I really am.”
So now I’m thinking about getting one, too.
I mean - I’m not.
Of course I’m not! Why would I, how could I?
Except that, I also am. A bit? A lil lift of the jowls, a taughtening of the jaw, a smoothing down and ironing out of the neck…
Though of course, I categorically cannot afford one. My colleague said hers would have cost £19K but she got it half price with the promise of an article about her surgeon; I presumably could cut (lol) a similar deal, assuming I was prepared to go public with all the gruesome details BUT, even if I was, and even if I found a way to lay my hands on the required remaining nine and a half large… Would I do it?
Do I really want to go That Far? It’s friggin a general anaesthetic and epically invasive and requires weeks and weeks of healing, and I wouldn’t be able to exercise, and what if something went wrong and I died on the table or, just ended up looking awful, and even if it all went swimmingly: what would that do to the (admittedly pretty meagre) hold I have left on feminism?
And what would my bloke say?
And I KNOW I wasn’t even thinking about it at all, until that new spate of celebs who may or may not have got (truly excellent) face lifts, all that speculation over the surgical status of Brad Pitt and Lindsay Lohan et cetera, cos that has run wild recently, with neither confirming or denying (though Lohan’s father has said categorically not), but if they had… I would very much be interested in hearing who their surgeons were.
Because they. Look. Fire.
Ah, feck it. I’m not going to go there for a while, not even going to think about it. I’ll just let it percolate on my brain’s back boiler until I either get over the idea in time, or just up and go for it, one day. Watch this space. And face.
In the meantime, a tweakment I’ve very much appreciated lately, one proposed as a resolution to “O Face”, Ozempic Face: the loss of facial volume, the gauntness, which can accompany weight loss (though which also accompanies ageing. The epic Kathrine Ryan recently did an Instagram vid in which she tried to convince one of her internet followers she really wasn’t on Ozempic - despite this follower’s absolute conviction, she was. The evidence, the follower thought, was in changes to Ryan’s face. But that, Ryan said, was not what was happening to her face. Being over 40 was what was happening to her face. Like Ryan, I am not on Ozempic - like Ryan, the O Face I am experiencing, is Over 40 Face).
Where were we?
Oh yes!
This tweak is an injectable. It’s an evolution on a pre existing one which… OK, so on the sliding scale of these kinds of aesthetic interventions, the severity of them, emotional and facial impact of them, and how we rationalise them in terms of our own morality… I’d say it comes in below Botox. It’s the sort of thing you can do, while telling yourself, and everyone else, you haven’t really had any work. I’ve got a friend who’d never have Botox, thoroughly disapproves of it… But who’s had this one plenty of times. She thinks it is absolutely fine.
You could think of it as a solid beginner’s tweak.
It’s called