Alicia Douvall and her daughter Georgia Douvall in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
Alicia Douvall and her daughter Georgia Douvall in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
Model Alicia Douvall became infamous for her addiction to plastic surgery. But what effect has it had on her clever, sensible daughter? Here, both reveal how their lives have been scarred ...
Of all the striking attributes of Alicia Douvall, perhaps the most disquieting is the fact that the model who once turned every male head is still only 37 - the age at which a woman is supposed to be at the peak of her beauty.
When you've had millions of dollars worth of cosmetic surgery by this age - and were stunning to start with - you'd imagine you'd look like, well, Angelina Jolie by now.
"That's who the surgeon who did my last face implants told me I'd look like," she says, trying (and failing) to raise an eyebrow at the irony.
"Instead, I looked like an alien. Even Georgia, my daughter, said: 'Oh my God, you have to get that fixed' - and she never tells me I look a mess."
Georgia, who is sitting beside her on the sofa, bites her lip. "It was bad, really bad," she agrees. "I never like to comment too much on how Mum looks, because it can make her worse, but I couldn't believe what they'd done to her."
Sadly, this was not the first time Georgia had recoiled from her mother after a trip to the cosmetic surgeon. The 21-year-old has spent her entire life accepting the fact that her mum - a model, socialite and reality TV star - has facelifts, bottom lifts and boob jobs the way that other well-heeled mums have manicures.
Alicia can't actually tell you precisely how many operations she's had, but it is well over 300. And when you add in more minor procedures, it means that she's spent the best part of Georgia's life in bandages and on morphine.
Georgia says one of her earliest memories was of her mum coming to collect her from her grandmother's house, looking like a burns victim. ("Which I was," points out Alicia. "It was dermabrasion: not the micro-stuff but the full hit, where they basically take off the top layer of skin.")
"I didn't recognise her," says Georgia. "I didn't even know it was a person, never mind my mum. I remember saying to my gran: 'It's a monster.'"
Recently, Georgia was at her mother's side in yet another clinic as the doctor explained just how serious her situation had become.
Over a year ago, Alicia was told that her bottom implants had burst and silicon was seeping into her body. The potential health risks were brutally explained.
"They said I needed to have them out immediately, and most certainly within six months, because once the silicon is in the body it can't get out. It stays there. It can cause auto-immune problems - maybe even cancer."
So when is she booked in for the surgery? Georgia rolls her eyes. "She won't have them out," she says. "I've pleaded with her. The doctors have pleaded with her."
Alicia shakes her head. "If they take the implants out, I'll be left with a saggy bum. I really don't think I could live with that."
Alicia Douvall in 2002. Photo / Getty Images
She then embarks on an extraordinary explanation of how she'd be prepared to lose the implants in her bottom by preserving its shape in some other way.
She considered having fat siphoned to it from other parts of her body, but concluded that wasn't an option: "They can't take it from the stomach because it's the wrong type of fat."
She decided to put on weight naturally, but couldn't. "I tried to eat cakes and things, but I just couldn't bear to put them in my body. I eat organically these days."
It truly is remarkable that any mother (and Alicia also has a five-year-old daughter called Papaya) could contemplate risking her life for the sake of a pert bottom. But that is the reality of life for Alicia.
A former glamour model and ex-girlfriend of Simon Cowell, Alicia became the darling of the media in the early 2000s, first because of a string of celebrity boyfriends, then because of her predilection for surgery.
Five years ago, she was back in the news when she announced she was expecting a baby, and named former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan as the father.
In 2015, fresh from rehab and having announced that she was tackling her cosmetic surgery 'addiction', Alicia said she was turning over a new wholesome leaf. Then promptly went into the Celebrity Big Brother house to celebrate.
Born Sarah Howes (she changed her name to one more suited to glamour modelling), her father was a self-made millionaire and Tory councillor and she attended the prestigious Springfield Park School, Horsham, West Sussex.
However, the fact that she was expelled at the age of 14 for possession of cannabis and attempted suicide for the first time not long after suggests that her childhood was anything but happy.
She talks bitterly about her father being a "strict, domineering, controlling man", desperately worried about his standing in the community and prone to violent outbursts.
Her father called her 'ugly', she claims, and she is convinced that her body issues stem from this.
She talks of locking herself in her bedroom and playing with her Barbie dolls incessantly. She says she wanted to be a real-life Barbie, "who was beautiful and had Ken".
At boarding school, her obsession with how she looked was indulged rather than challenged.
"Everyone there had an eating disorder," she says. "At least 80 per cent of girls, I'd say. I had anorexia, then bulimia."
She can't remember why she first cut her wrists, but thinks it was "a cry for help rather than anything serious".
By the time she was 15, she was almost feral, having run away from home. When, at 16, she fell pregnant, she went back to tell her parents.
"They were distraught," she says. "My dad couldn't even look at me. It was such a big scandal."
The father of the baby legged it, of course. "He didn't want anything to do with me.'"
I wish I'd never had any cosmetic surgery. I never will again - but it's too late now.
The consensus - not shared by Alicia, she insists - was that this wild-child was not fit to be a mother. Her parents insisted that they would raise Georgia. "I didn't really have a choice. My mum kept saying: 'You have no job and you have no home.'"
"The agreement was that I would get modelling work but come home and see Georgia at the weekends."
Alicia is on good terms with her mother now, but at the time, she says, she felt her baby was being 'stolen' from her.
"'I think it was really harmful. They didn't let me be a mother.
"When I did get her back full-time, when she was eight, I had to kidnap her. I just put her in the car and drove away."
It sounds fantastical, but Georgia corroborates the story.
"I did want to live with her. She was my mum and I loved her."
By this point, Alicia did have a career of sorts, though not one that her father could boast about in the golf club.
She'd also had the first of a staggering 16 boob jobs (she lied about her age for the first one, which was performed when she was just 17), had her nose fixed and had been diagnosed with body dysmorphia.
"I went into a clinic and asked them to take off every mole on my body," she says. "They said I needed help."
Few clinics ever turned Alicia away, even though she turned up at one holding a Barbie doll to show the surgeons just how she wanted to look.
"It was always boobs and bum. I thought if I looked like a porn star, then men would find me attractive."
And men did. Or at least a certain type of man did. It helped she was working as a glamour model, doing topless shots and hanging out in nightclubs.
She had a brief liaison with Simon Cowell - and went on to sell a salacious and utterly implausible '11-times-a-night' story. There were also flings with Mickey Rourke, EastEnders actor Dean Gaffney, Manchester United footballer Fabien Barthez and basketball star Dennis Rodman.
Are there any celebrities we don't know about? She shrugs. "A few more footballers, five maybe. A few EastEnders actors."
Without exception, these 'relationships' were car crashes. "I have never had any luck with men," she says. "The problem is they all wanted the porn star, not me."
Where was Georgia in all this? Alicia talks about Georgia being looked after by a succession of nannies. "She was well looked after," she says. "They fed her."
What was her role? "To earn the money," she says. No doubt the rich boyfriends helped in that regard.
Perhaps it was a blessing that Georgia wanted to go to boarding school. She says she asked to go herself, and "loved the rules, the discipline, the order".
When she did come home, at weekends and in school holidays, it was to be once again confronted by her mother's chaotic life, and often to be pulled into it.
Alicia Douvall in 2011. Photo / Getty Images
Listening to Georgia talk about living with her mother's obsession with cosmetic surgery (at one point Alicia was having one operation a week), sounds for all the world like a carer talking about looking after a cancer patient. Hospital visits, dressings to be changed, ambulance calls in the middle of the night when wounds burst or Alicia collapsed on the floor.
Then there was the emotional strain of dealing with a woman who was (perhaps still is) unhinged. Once, Georgia had to miss an exam because her mother 'needed' her to be at her side for yet more surgery.
"I was so selfish," Alicia says now. "Georgia has always been more like the mother. She still looks after me."
Georgia clearly adores her. "No, she's not like other mums - but she's my mum and I love her."
Georgia also supported Alicia by offering sensible advice when each relationship collapsed.
She despairs of her mother's track record with men, agreeing "they treat her like dirt, and she takes it. I'm the one who has to point out: 'Mum, that isn't a normal relationship. You need to get rid.'"
Even Georgia was horrified when, in 2011, Alicia said she was pregnant."She told me on my 16th birthday. Some present," she quips.
No one thought Alicia was fit to be a mother again, but the arrival of baby Papaya changed everything.
During the pregnancy, Alicia was unable to have plastic surgery. She says the enforced break made her reassess everything and helped 'break' her addiction.
She is now an outspoken critic of the industry and says that "seeing young women in cosmetic surgery waiting rooms makes me want to cry. I want to shake them and say: 'Do not do it. You'll end up like me.'"
She makes much of the fact that she's running her own skincare business - supporting herself. But funds are clearly not what they were. She had to sell her house and is living in a rented flat.
Is she a reformed character? She says she is, but Georgia does sound a warning bell when she says that Alicia still gets very stressed and has started to 'lean' on little Papaya, confiding problems in her.
Georgia thinks it is inappropriate. "I've said to her: 'You can't do this, Mum. You can't lean on her. You have to be the mum.'"
Quite how Georgia is so sensible, given her background, is a miracle. She's certainly never been near a plastic surgeon's scalpel - despite her own mother's best efforts. "I remember she said that I needed my ears pinned back and then she said I should have a boob job.
"But I won't do anything like that. I don't even dye my hair.
"I think watching what Mum has been through has made me anti the whole thing. Once you start, you can't stop. You keep seeing things that need to be 'fixed' when they are perfectly fine."
If only her mother - whose health remains in jeopardy as a result of her vanity - had a fraction of Georgia's common sense.
"If I could turn the clock back, I would," says Alicia. "I wish I'd never had any cosmetic surgery. I never will again - but it's too late now."
