Am I too old for a Hollywood wax?

When should we stop having beauty treatments? Am I ridiculous for continuing a lifetime of self care, making the shape of a Pretzel for no one other than myself, or wonderfully wise?

Plus vegan recipe of the week, using what I should be picking this time next summer (I’m already looking at the future! Progress!). And the first extract from my new revenge thriller, for paid subscribers only! Sorry! Any new annual subscribers get a signed hard copy of my previous book. If you have already subscribed, I can send you a copy anyway!

Me at Goop’s two-day event in London...

Even as a child, I was terrified of ageing. On day trips to freezing Frinton aged 11, 12, I would cover my hair in Parasol, a sun block, and conceal my face behind a tea towel. My first proper beauty treatment was when I arrived in London, as a student. It was 1977. I was very concerned about a star-shaped cluster of thread veins blow my right eye. I would try to cover it with No7 foundation, to no avail. And so I took myself off to Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge to a clinic at the top of a very steep flight of stairs, where I underwent sclerotherapy, to cauterise the tiny veins, followed by the application of a very small pot of cream made from snail’s shells. On the way back to the Tube, I noticed a sign for the Tao Clinic, which promised to eliminate surplus hair using electrolysis. Sign me up! I had hair on my face, around my nipples, on my tummy, snaking up to my belly button. I ventured inside. It was like the field hospital from M*A*S*H: rows of beds, hidden behind curtains. I embarked on years of treatment. The hair meant I was too shy to ever have a boyfriend; I felt he would be repelled by my body. I believed I had to be perfect before anyone could see or touch me.

         The treatments escalated over the years. I had veneers on my teeth (£10,000+; I could have bought a car), which were grey and eroded from decades of only eating apples, and drinking Diet Coke (or Tab, as it was then). I had countless leg and underarm waxes, bikini waxes that escalated to the Brazilian and then the Hollywood. I bought scalp masks, pore strips, expensive unguents made by Revive. I had my first vegetable rinse at Molton Brown, on South Molton Street: unlike me, my hair was now no longer virgin. Pedicures: my toenails only saw the light of day under lockdown. Massages. Colonics. Oxygen facials. Reflexology. Indian head massages (not from my Punjabi then husband, suffice to say). My eyebrows were semi-permanently tattooed (they faded to purple over time; attractive!). I’ve worn lash extensions, which go haywire after a couple of weeks, and had collagen injected into my lips (painful). Laser therapy on more thread veins (doesn’t work), Botox, Botox, Botox. Finally, a face lift and blepharoplasty. Oh, and an eyebrow transplant, 500 hairs taken from the back of my head, and inserted as plugs by the same people who gave Wayne Rooney a decent head of hair. I am now Brooke Shields, only as the hairs believe they are still on my scalp, they never stop growing. I’ve stood in many a cubicle to be airbrushed tanned: my husband once remarked, after I returned home from the spa atop Harrods, that ‘I didn’t expect you to come home a different ethnicity.’ The photo above is of me undergoing light therapy courtesy of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop seminar in London a couple of years ago. The day was by turns expensive and hilarious: she walked around flanked by two bodyguards. What did she think we were going to do to her? Kill her with bad vibes? (Thank you, Woody Allen.)

         I must be part of the first generation to reach maturity, to put it kindly, having gone through all this stuff, mostly from its birth and mine. This is apparently quite rare in the ‘civilian’ world (my environ is the MSM). I am always shocked to meet women who have never had a facial, or a massage. What on earth have you been doing? I will always cry. ‘Um, bringing up children,’ is the usual answer.

         A lot has been fun. A spa in a hotel (ubiquitous these days) is a great way to escape the boredom of sitting opposite your husband, having found you have nothing to say to each other. In Puglia, a handsome young man massaged me with his feet, suspended as he was from ropes in the ceiling. That was nice. For me, the treatments and tweaks are a means of shrouding myself in confidence. The wellness industry is now big business (I won’t give figures, I find them meaningless and boring). The reason for its growth I believe is that the beauty industry has exhausted itself on making us look better on the outside, and is now delving to make us better on the inside, too. But what is wrong with striving to be the best we can be? The young boys and girls on Love Island get a lot of stick, but at least they take care of their bodies. Unable to afford houses, it’s where they live, inside their perfectly oiled, taut skin.

         But I am wondering now if I should stop, go rogue and hairy. I wonder what the (always) young therapist thinks as she strips away grey pubes. I wonder if she laughs, later, wonders why on earth I still bother. But being well groomed is embedded in my psyche. I could no longer go to a party not having had my hair dyed than fly to the moon. I remember having lunch with supermodel Marie Helvin, and she told me she dyes her own hair from a box! I nearly fell off my chair. My feeling is that to look after your nails, your skin is a sign of self respect. I wish more men felt the same: I once went to India with a man for work and the sight of his feet in sandals made me gag. And we shouldn’t just accept that growing older means a slippery slope to M&S Classics and no eyelashes. I have a friend in her Eighties who whenever we meet for lunch is immaculately turned out (often in Zara), carrying a Bottega Veneta bag she’s had since the Sixties. She respects herself, and those around her respect her too. I’ve realised too late that having all these procedures, being oven ready at all times, doesn’t mean I have been loved. Having the fat from my thighs injected into the backs of my hands to make them look younger and plumper didn’t prompt a man to put a ring on it, or even to hold it. The procedures haven’t meant that I have loved myself, either. I have been a great big, expensive renovation project, a Forth Bridge that never got finished. Instead of spinning plates, I wish I had been more Linda McCartney. Natural. Unadorned. Feather cut. Loved.