Opinion: Am I the only woman who wishes Botox had never been invented?

Many women don’t and won’t have the choice – and it costs an awful lot of money to make time stand still. Photo / Supplied 123rf

OPINION:

My biggest personal expense, outside dentistry, is the £165 ($335) I spend every 10 weeks having my mane dyed a rich variety of golden-brown highlights that knock a decade off my 55-year-old face. Or so it feels. But every time I enter my colourist’s Soho salon, I wonder how long I’m going to fight the surging tide of grey. It’s a question that may be rendered irrelevant by the news that scientists have discovered stem cells’ role in turning hair grey. Apparently, this happens when stem cells become “stuck” within hair follicles and aren’t exposed to the proteins that activate pigment – but what it means in beauty industry terms is that the boffins are much closer to reversing the whole process.

When I was young, I fondly imagined that one day I could step off the anti-ageing treadmill and embrace my inner Miss Marple. But this was back in the 1980s when facelifts were something for Hollywood stars and Knightsbridge wives – before chemical peels, Botox and dermal fillers were de rigeur and saying “you look refreshed!” became code for “what have you had done?”.

Now, when I meet up with women my age there’s often a slight air of suspicion as we scour each other’s faces for signs of artificial enhancement. Is one of us the group’s Mary Archer, who said of her own facelift in a court case brought against her former PA, “I didn’t even tell [my sister], simply because I wished to keep the matter entirely private.”

Increasingly, it feels as if every middle-aged woman I know is halfway through a beauty race she never signed up for. You don’t know whether to crash out and lie wounded by the track, or carry on and find you need laser-skin rejuvenation to get to the next staging post.

In theory, I’m a proud feminist who embraces the fine lines laughter and experience have written on my face. In practice, I’m increasingly unsure if I can resist the siren lure of “tweakments” when I’m one of the dwindling number of women in media circles with nasolabial folds that resemble the Mariana Trench. I certainly don’t judge my more telegenic colleagues for getting their visages plumped and smoothed like satin cushions. It makes excellent career sense. Many of us still remember the hatchet job AA Gill carried out on classicist Mary Beard for having the temerity to present a BBC TV show while in possession of long grey hair and standard-issue British teeth. No matter that Beard’s one of the most brilliant and charismatic classical scholars of her age, nor that many a male academic holds a torch for her (I can assure you of this – Prof Beard is a Cambridge neighbour).

Beard remains resolutely herself, but many of us fear we can’t afford not to buckle. I’ve been astonished to find how many young women are having regular Botox in the hope they can stave off wrinkles forever. It makes you wonder if they shudder when they look at an unrepentantly sagging face like mine. Although I should confess I’m no stranger to treatments carried out in the name of vanity – I’ve been whitening my teeth for years and I’ve twice had Veinwave, or thermocoagulation treatment, for red spider veins at the side of my nose. I’ve also sat through a consultation for laser treatment to deal with old acne scars, before chickening out with lingering memories of Logan’s Run and the Esculpator Mark III’s operator going rogue on Michael York.

In my early 30s, a short, bald TV executive told me, unsolicited, that I should have a prominent mole on my face excised if I wanted to do more broadcasting, so I told him to naff off. The fact is no woman who’s even slightly in the public eye can be completely in possession of her own face. It’s easy to understand how someone like Madonna, who has played out most of her life in the public arena, feels justified in using every cosmetic enhancement in the playbook to keep herself looking ageless. I say “ageless” with intent, as I truly don’t feel the anti-ageing shebang makes anyone look young exactly. Instead, you’re in a weird world of otherness, much like Madame Tussauds, where women (and sometimes men) look like themselves, but also really, really don’t. It’s disconcerting and we all know it, but it’s equally unsettling to be the only person in a room of waxworks with wrinkles.

Although, of course, many women don’t and won’t have the choice; it costs a lot of money to make time stand still. But here’s the curious thing: women are so locked into this infernal beauty race they don’t stop to note that barely any men are cheering them on. I notice it’s male friends who shake their heads and whisper, “Too much work!”. As one pal who’s dating in his 60s told me: “I want someone who’s as rumpled as I am.” I’d love to think we’ll all call an anti-ageing truce, but it seems more likely that the chaps will get sucked in, too. If no one need go grey, won’t male businessmen opt for Don Draper’s virile black barnet in a bid to stave off boardroom coups? And yet the odd thing is many women worship Roger Sterling’s silver-fox quiff, just as blokes find Helen Mirren’s grey mane drop-dead sexy. The more we embrace artifice, the greater the hankering for what’s natural. We need to stiffen our resolve instead of stiffening our faces.