It was said that the dazzlingly beautiful Diane de Poitiers, mistress of King Louis of France, (I’m not sure which one – there were sixteen of them,) was reputed to retain her looks by never altering her expression and thus died without a line on her face.
She sounds a right bundle of laughs.
A recent survey, (yep – another one,) of five thousand cinemagoers discovered that they contorted their features 20 times during a horror movie, 50 times during a thriller and 115 times watching a comedy. The study concluded that these facial quirks repeated over a five year period could result in 50 per cent worse frown lines and crow’s feet and that laughing and smiling worsened wrinkles and folds around the mouth by 40 per cent. The lesson would appear to be – stop going to the pictures or you’ll end up with a face like the upper of a well-worn shoe.
We’ve become a ‘lookist’ society. Social media has already taught mere tots all the tricks of the trade. Precocious poses by six or seven-year-olds are common – the three-quarter turn and one-leg-forward stance, hand on hip, chin down and a coquettish expression. Sub-teens are obsessing about ‘body issues’. School formals are a parade of identikit fake-tanned, elaborately coiffed, professionally made-up sixteen-year-olds attempting to out-Beyoncé Beyoncé herself and looking the same age as their idol. Models with razor-sharp cheekbones and pillowy lips stare stonily out of every magazine. Sulky immobility is the ‘look du jour’. Their male adolescent escorts are in on the act. Normally strangers to soap, they’re fragrant as roses, with fashionable haircuts (often unflattering to the jug-eared) and kitted out dapper as Burton’s dummies.
Moving marginally more upmarket, Sarah Ferguson Duchess of York has confessed over four pages of a tabloid to “having extensive work done”, most recently an interesting technique involving the insertion of fine threads into the wobbly bits under the chin and jowls, which are hauled upwards like a fishing-net and tied in a knot behind each ear. (N.B. This may not be a medically accurate description of the procedure.) “This is why I look so good at sixty,” she trills. No bloomin’ wonder! Sadly, the effects last only six to eight months, the threads dissolve and the face falls like the stage curtain at the end of a pantomime.
You can test the efficacy of the procedure yourself by sitting opposite a mirror in an ambient light, resting your elbows on a table, chin propped on cupped hands (thus pushing everything northwards) your forearms masking your neck where the seven rings of Saturn have begun to make an appearance. See? Knocks ten years off you – but I can think of no social situation where you could sustain the pose for long. It was a favourite photographic trick of ageing Hollywood leading ladies in the postwar era. Celebrities nowadays past 60 have had everything lifted and tied in a bow at the back of the neck. More and more ordinary citizens are walking about with hardly anything they started off with.
I visit my local salon for my modest monthly eyebrow tidy and tint. It’s gently suggested I might have them ‘microbladed’, which is basically tattooed on. “Let me just show you how it would look,” says the little beautician who is all of twenty years old and whose own brows are a perfect pair of swallows in flight. She lightly pencils in a myriad hair-like strokes, extending the length and thickness. She holds up a mirror. I am all eyebrows. I am Frida Kahlo, the mono-browed Mexican artist. I slink through town, head bowed. In my familiar mirror at home, it’s worse. I’m Groucho Marx.
Proof that we’re living in a vainglorious age is the press report of a Derry man who had such a successful hair transplant in Turkey that he recommended the surgeon to all his thinning friends. So far, NINETY-SEVEN have acted upon his advice. By way of reward, the surgeon is offering Derry Man an all-expenses-paid set of tooth veneers.
Truly, we are at the end of days…
