Kathy Lette: Read between my lines

I WAS walking through a department store yesterday when a beauty assistant pounced on me. “Your skin!” she shrieked, with such over-whelming intensity that it seemed impossible that class-A narcotics weren’t causally related.

”Can’t you just read between my lines?” I whimpered ... Yeah right. And Dolly Parton is ageing naturally. Photo: Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

I WAS walking through a department store yesterday when a beauty assistant pounced on me. “Your skin!” she shrieked, with such over-whelming intensity that it seemed impossible that class-A narcotics weren’t causally related. She then lunged at my face, studying its epidermal topography with the same intensity Burke and Wills consulted their field maps. The beauty therapist then gasped, before making a face like the heroine in a horror movie who has just seen The Creature. “Are you aware of your upper lip erosion and hideous crow’s feet?”

Apparently I had enough crow’s feet to start a bird sanctuary. Actually, they weren’t merely crow’s feet: they were gigantic ostrich prints…Who let the pterodactyls loose? It seems they’ve been stomping all over my face and I hadn’t even noticed.

“Can’t you just read between my lines?” I whimpered. “I’ve lived! I’ve learned! I’ve earned these wrinkles, goddamn it. Surely experience is as valuable, in professional terms, as having young skin?” I beseeched her.

.…Yeah right. And Dolly Parton is ageing naturally.

Judging by the beauty assistant’s guffaws, after a certain age, “natural” is just a euphemism for “haggard” and “je ne sais quoi” is merely French for “not getting laid any more”.

Clearly, beauty is one of the most natural and lovely things…that money can buy. That’s the lesson we’ve learnt from the perfect people we see on Instagram and reality TV shows like Love Island etc.

In the quest to emulate plastic androids like the Kardashians and manufactured co, botox, fillers and collagen injections have become as common place as a facial or a wax. Botox has become so mainstream that a chemist chain called Superdrug is now offering a lunch time treatment for a third the price of professional clinics.

Inexpensive, yes, but at what cost? Just because botox is being offered on the high street, women should not simply regard it as just another beauty treatment. All medical procedures come with significant risks. Botox is developed from the botulism bacterium.
It’s a dangerous substance. If too much botox is administered on the forehead patients are left with droopy eyelids, and if injected into neck wrinkles, your larynx can become paralysed and you stop breathing.

Call me old fashioned, but I have never really thought there’s much point in being beautiful if you’re, you know, dead. And why has it become fashionable to freeze women’s faces into expressionless masks? Clinics report a huge rise in the number of 18- to 25-year-old girls lining up to achieve the blank visage of a Barbie doll – a case of Send in the Clones. But here’s a thought … if Barbie is so popular, then why do you have to buy her friends?

Just as I was pondering this conundrum, another beautician butted in to suggest I have a chemical peel to erase laughter lines.... Or perhaps I’d prefer a Retin A cream which just eats away at your skin. I recoiled. What the hell was that? Ebola in a jar? Surely a simpler solution is to just read Trump’s twitter feed, because, believe me, one glimpse, and you will never laugh or smile ever again!

But the point is, why the hell can’t women come of age in the public arena with wrinkles and self esteem intact? Like blokes do. Why do Woody Allen, Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas still “get the girl”? What is it? A charity engagement for “Help the Aged?” If time flies, then these guys have frequent air miles.

Why is it that for men, every cloud has a silver-haired lining? Why should women have to avoid all lines, except P&O? Botox would give me a total personality-ectomy; it would wipe my physiognomic slate clean. Women say that cosmetic surgery makes them more attractive to men. But why would you want to be with a man who only wants you because you’re silicone from tonsils to toenails?

“So?” one of the beauticians demanded, with all the animation of an Easter Island statue. “What’s it going to be? Botox? Collagen fillers or a chemical peel?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” I replied, making a beeline for the door, “I’d like to go spend some more quality time with my wrinkles.”

If she could have frowned, I’m sure she would have.