May 19, 2012 |
There is a bloom in youth, a certain quality to the skin, a softness that nothing can touch or replicate. My friend Marianne who used to be with Select (so she is beautiful as well as youthful) still has that bloom. It really only belongs to the young. And it passes as we age. It leaves us.
I can make a phone call. “Sure. VASER Lipo. We’ve got really good prices at the moment.”
I have some anxiety about my waistline.
“I’ve had it on my flanks. Muffin top and all that. Sucked out. And there’s no overhang.”
Good. I was worried about the “overhang”. And the skin on my face. It is showing some signs. Do you have “good prices” on chemical peels?
“Yes.”
Don’t they just burn off the top layers of the skin?
“To a degree, yes. A bit like a burn. You have to wear sun block for a few weeks afterwards.”
If you have nothing better to do, you can search the internet for “movie star” or “celebrity” and “plastic surgery” and “disaster”. Or leave out the disaster. The results are similar. The results that are not verified and checked lead to information on nearly everyone who lives on the other side of the screen.
There are meditations on Axl Rose’s skin, Naomi Campbell’s cheeks, Nicole Kidman’s lips, Lindsay Lohan’s veneers, Gwyneth’s jaw line (not a convincing case) and the presence (or absence) of Botox and fillers on everyone, with a ponderous focus on Lucy Liu, Madonna, Penélope Cruz and Burt Reynolds’s peculiarly “feminine” new look.
You can also study endless “then” and “now” pictures and be quite certain that neither Madonna nor Courtney Love really look like Madonna or Courtney Love any more. It is easy, for example, to search Google Images by name and date – this makes the detective work (on Tom Cruise’s nose, for example) simple if unresolved.
You can also follow the progress of Cruise’s chest (from Risky Business onwards). For most of his career Cruise has had a very sculpted chest. He probably has a fast metabolism and good exercise programme. But there is one very famous picture, taken on the set of Mission Impossible, in which his chest lacks form. Quite spectacularly lacks form. Could just be a bad picture. On a bad day. And, like some famous types, Cruise could be somewhere between a radical weight-loss programme and radical workout programme – a sort of halfway place.
Anyway, the VASER Lipo clinic I phoned did say there can be an issue with loose skin. But not a big issue.
“You need to wear a garment. I had to wear a garment for six weeks.”
A garment? You mean like a corset?
“Yes. Similar to a corset. It compresses the area. Sometimes you have to wear it for weeks. The results are well worth it.”
And then the skin gets tight again. It doesn’t look like a bowl of porridge?
“Yes. It looks really natural.”
Tim Mayhew is a personal, and sometimes A-list, trainer. And he has seen clients with lipo scars. They tend to put the weight back on again, he says. People fall back into the same eating and lifestyle patterns.
Mayhew doesn’t like the A-list/celebrity tag. “Nine out of 10 celebrity trainers, in my opinion, don’t have a clue what they are doing with regards to corrective exercise and correct technique.” He says before you put someone through a radical “movie star” body-shaping and weight-loss programme, you should identify and address deeper postural or body issues. Otherwise… “I had a client who trained in Primrose Hill with a very well-known trainer and she spent thousands of pounds with him and her body, at the end of it, was trashed.”
The problem with looking at the super-famous is that we know what Gwyneth looks like, but we can’t tell, from just looking at picture, what her lower back “feels” like. Perhaps you should look at a celebrity’s MRI (a picture of their bone density) before you decide to copy their body and diet. “If you are just doing boot-camp-style training there will come a point when that client will start developing back issues or knee issues,” says Mayhew. “So, what then? Then you are going to have to go seriously into corrective exercise. It all needs to be identified from the beginning.”
But who cares? I just want Gwyneth’s stomach. I want my friend Marianne’s youthful bloom. I want perfect skin. And I don’t care what it costs.
“I had one high-profile client who had an exercise addiction. And an eating disorder,” says Mayhew. “She wanted to train for two hours a day, five days a week, but she’s only eating 800 calories a day. For that kind of exercise she should be eating 2,500 calories a day.”
So what is it like on the other side of the silver screen, where they are all so lean and slender…? “It’s a bit like one of those programmes where they come and redo your home in plasterboard. It looks good for the TV show but probably falls apart soon afterwards.”
And not every man can develop a six-pack, he says, no matter what his diet or programme. Some things come down to metabolism. “If you are naturally lean, then yes. If not then it is extremely, extremely difficult. You might have to have a fairly miserable existence to get that body.”
So, VASER Lipo. They insert a probe that sonically vibrates the fat before it is sucked out in a tube. It allows them to target recalcitrant fat that exercise won’t reach. And fillers. Everyone loves fillers. They will plump up your cheeks. Fill in the lines. Reshape the nose. Then you can Botox the neck chords. Or fat graft into the hands for rejuvenation (you don’t want enlarged or arthritic-looking joints).
It is good to read the medical manuals on these procedures. They have a very dry take on things. Carrying out liposuction, notes Dr Sydney R Coleman in his work on “structural fat grafting”, a surgeon should be aware that “changing the relationship between a woman’s thighs, hips or abdomen can result in an unnatural or even bizarre proportion”. And peels, particularly the phenol peel, which is less popular these days… According to Foad Nahai’s The Art of Aesthetic Surgery: Principles & Techniques, “when applied to the skin, phenol induces a controlled predictable chemical injury – a partial thickness chemical burn – that on healing results in smoother, more youthful-appearing skin”.
The surgeons say that the average patient, if they want to look younger, will need to combine a surgical face-lift with peels, fractional lasers, fillers, Botox – different procedures address different issues (sagging muscles, sunken cheeks, tear troughs, naso-labial folds, thinning lips, lines, wrinkles, etc).
“Most patients who seek treatment for facial ageing mistakenly assume,” says Nahai, “that some type of face-lift will produce the desired improvement… They commonly don’t differentiate between the gravitational changes of ageing and the effects of photo-ageing.”
There is a bruised glamour that comes with these procedures, especially if you have them young. Part of the appeal of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games video is she looks way too young for those lips and that nose. It gives her a damned masochistic sheen.
There is also glamour that comes with ageing. There is a beauty to the sunken cheeks, slender lines and drawn skin, but it is slightly gothic. As an vain and ageing male I might get something done at some time but I mainly follow a miserable diet, relentless exercise and study pictures of old men I love and admire – I keep William Burroughs and Christopher Isherwood close – they remind me it is possible to be old and stylish and beautiful.
Procedures are interesting. I don’t think they make people look young so much as different. There is a bloom in youth. It is not possible, at the moment anyway, to truly replicate it. And it is both maddening and beautiful that the bloom passes through us, and all the money in the world can’t buy it back.
by Tony Marcus
