Hair loss
Lepper said that this is one issue that doesn’t get spoken about enough, but women do need to understand that it’s something they may experience.
“I would monitor it first because you have got seasonal fallout, which no one talks about as well. So normally it’s around about winter time you do shed and so you’ll on average will lose about 50 to 100 hairs a day, and so that’s normal.
“If you’re tying your hair up, you’ll notice more because you’ve held that hair into that ponytail. As soon as you start brushing it, it starts coming out. So what you’ve got is if it’s going anywhere over 150 to 300 hairs a day and it’s consistent, then you [need to] start thinking about it.
Going grey
What was once considered a taboo idea, a growing number of women are now embracing their greying hair, and finding styles and ways that it suits them.
Lepper said that a growing number of his clients – some as young as 35 – are embracing their grey hair. But there’s no set rule for when to stop dying your hair and let nature take over.
“It depends on how grey you are. The thing is as well is how much they want to release, because sometimes you want to do it part by part. So you might want to do the front hairline first and then start growing into that.
“A lot of my clients will do front hairline because it’s quite a cute money piece in a sense, and then you start moving from that backwards.
“As your hair gets grey, it gets more resistant. So, therefore, it’s not going to deposit its colour as much. But there are colours now that can break through that layer, so it’s deeper pigments, which will go deeper into the cuticle, but it’s more about the emotional ready.
“So you’ve got clients that will go, ‘I’m kind of ready’, and then you’ll put a few lighter pieces in and they go, ‘Oh no, let’s just put it back to where it was’, so you’ve got to be just at that stage of your life.
“But we’ve got clients from 35 to so on that will say, let’s go grey. So it’s more of a trend.”
Botox
Botox, face or lip fillers or other kinds of medical treatments to make us look younger are becoming cheaper and more normalised in society, but knowing when or where to start can be part of the challenge.
Stone said that she doesn’t believe in “treating unless there is something to treat”, and that the customer and the clinician should be clear in what they are seeking to achieve with a procedure.
If you do start using Botox, to maintain the results, Stone said, then on average you are looking at treatment about every three months.
“But it’s also going to depend on the dose that is being used. So this is a medication and the higher the dose we use, the longer it’s going to last for. And I believe there’s a real balance – you can slam a face with Botox and have someone looking really frozen and it’s going to last six months, but is that the ideal outcome? For me, no.
“There’s a real balance of working out for the individual, tailoring their results.
“I believe the two hardest areas of the face to treat well are actually the forehead because it’s the only muscle that lifts the eyebrows up and the eyebrows are massively important in our communication, and the crow’s feet, because if we completely nail those, then it changes the smile and it changes the personality of the person.”
Sexual rejuvenation
Stone doesn’t just use botox, she is also an official trainer for platelet-rich plasma (PRP) procedures – commonly known as “vampire facials” – that involve treating people with their own blood.
And those procedures can also be used in both men and women for sexual rejuvenation and intimate wellness. For men, most commonly it is used for erectile dysfunction, but it has multiple uses for women, Stone told the podcast.
“Often if it’s for a leaky bladder, especially if it’s urge incontinence, which is the one where if you’re doing star jumps. That will often have an immediate impact because we’re creating support around the urethra, which is the tube that comes out from the bladder, immediately with putting the PRP there.
“Now, sometimes that will go away as the water that’s in the PRP dissipates, and then it’ll slowly improve again over the next few weeks to months. We’ll do a follow-up at six weeks, and then we do another follow up at three months.
“Sorts of changes that we tend to see for the urinary incontinence or leaky bladder are often complete improvement, or if it’s not a complete improvement, it’s a partial improvement. For the sexual rejuvenation side of things, you know, there’s a large number of women who’ve never orgasmed, and so it helps with sensation, lubrication, so great for people who [are] breast cancer survivors, we treat a lot of people who have been on tamoxifen, electrozole or genital symptoms of menopause. Women who have painful sex, it can often be helpful for, so we’ve also used it in vaginal mesh pain to bring the pain of mesh pain down.”
It’s one reason why the treatment is often known as an orgasm shot – or an o-shot – which is a licensed procedure.
Listen to the full episode of The Little Things for more on what you need to know about cosmetic procedures.
The Little Things is available on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The series is hosted by broadcaster Francesca Rudkin and health researcher Louise Ayrey. New episodes are available every Saturday.
