MRS TREFUSIS AND THE STROKE OF NOON

"I really, really need Botox", I wail to Mr Trefusis, hauling my brow up into my hairline where it belongs. "Then have some Botox", he replies, logically, if a little less flatteringly than I'd like.

On this note, I have some advice for all men: when women start to pull their face about and talk about cosmetic intervention, it's merely the grown-up version of 'does my bum look big in this' and your response should never be truthful. A little polite protestation about the years not having taken any kind of toll is appropriate, before steering the conversation to safer waters. If you don't feel it's laying it on too thick - and only you know the fragility of your beloved's ego in these matters - then a suggestion that she could give her similarly aged friend a few years can also go down well. If you're the poetic sort, I can recommend some cheesy hand-holding accompanied by quoting John Donne - "No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace/As I have seen in one autumnal face...". But gentlemen, you must do this with conviction and without crossing your fingers behind your back.

Of course, the older one is, the less likely one is to ask anyone if one's bum looks big - as the fabulous Catherine Deneuve is supposed to have said, after a certain age one must choose between one's face and one's behind, a few kilos can work wonders to plump out the lines and wrinkles. Callipygian women who look like hags from the front impress no one. The last word on the face Vs arse debate must go to Nigella Lawson: she's 52 and is ravishingly beautiful. I've seen her several times at The Wolseley and notwithstanding its gentle lighting, she could give most 35 year olds a run for their money. And for all women faced with this choice, I give you Sara Blakely, the inventor of SPANX, who was deservedly named in TIME 100 this year as one of its 100 most influential people in the world.

But as ever, I digress. I haven't exactly chosen the most tactful moment for railing against the aesthetic ravages of the passing years: Mr Trefusis's birthday is in a couple of months and if anyone should have the floor for a moan about getting older, it's him, particularly as it's astonishing how much older than me he is since I gave up having birthdays myself. But he doesn't seem to mind the years. In fact, he's always telling people he's older than he is: this is a strategy that hasn't really occurred to me - perhaps the idea is that people are always seriously impressed by how young you look if you're always claiming you're into the next decade. It doesn't really work for me. I prefer to be vague or dodge the question. After all, as Oscar Wilde once said 'A woman who will tell you her real age will tell you anything'. And I've always liked his idea that 'London is full of women who've been 35 for years'. Quite right too.

But lately, I've been having something of a mid-life crisis about the affect of age and gravity on the looks. I know that it's merely a metaphor, and I'm simply displacing a vast amount of angst about age vs accomplishment (youth being wasted on the young blah blah blah) onto my obsession with my appearance. I know I should get over it. But I don't want to look my age. At least, not until I've reconciled some stuff and at the moment the years are sliding past as easily as nails down a blackboard.

I do wonder whether I'm going to end up like Corinna from Swift's poem 'A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed' - it's all available to the modern woman - £200 anti-wrinkle creams, hair highlighting, chicken fillets for your bra, teeth whitening, eyelash extensions, false nails, fillers, not to mention the Botox...though I hasten to add I haven't indulged in all of these. I still look more or less the same after I've got ready for bed as I do beforehand. 40 watt soft tone bulbs help.

I make some idle protest to Mr Trefusis about Botox being a terrible waste of money and that I should get to grips with what's really behind my inability to proudly announce my true age. I believe I even offered some rubbish about my wrinkles being lines of experience, wisdom and character. Of course, he believes me a lot less than I believe myself when I'm offering up this kind of nonsense.

I've dabbled in botox before - I had a couple of sessions a few years ago with the beautiful Preema Vig, whose skill with botox and fillers is the secret behind many a well-known face and at the beginning of this year I went to Dr Rita Rakus, who was also very good and whose clinic is strategically placed near the back of Harrods so one can look as if one's in the market for a spot of upscale shopping and then exit through the Laduree tea room for 'rejuvenation' hem hem..... I confess I liked my three run-ins with botox very much indeed - it fixed my annoying Roger Moore-style eyebrow raising habit and made me look like a fresher, happier, less wearied version of me: it's gratifying how much better people respond to you when you look peaceful and friendly rather than suspicious and cross.

Botox may have replaced beautiful shoes as the thing I long for most, but since the Great Trefusis Economic Crisis kicked in, I can afford neither. And perhaps that's good for me. Perhaps I have to learn to live with the face that time and experience has given me and be grateful for it, rather than gazing mournfully at myself in the mirror like a superannuated Narcissus and seeing nothing but the sand running ever more rapidly through the hour-glass. Just because a little light cosmetic intervention can give the appearance of having turned back the clock, doesn't mean the years aren't there. Hmmm.

And on that note of solipsistic existential angst, I'll go and see what I can do to spruce myself up with makeup.

Anyway, if you can afford botox and so on and would like a recommendation, Preema Vig can be contacted on 07939560247 and Dr Rita Rakus is on 07000400321. 

TURN BACK THE CLOCK BEAUTY: MAKE-UP TRICKS FOR GROWN-UPS

The last time I wore this much slap, I was fourteen and given to loafing around Miss Selfridge, endlessly trying on burgundy sweater dresses and corduroy jump suits and testing their entire range of cosmetics on the back of my hand. My make-up look was every bit as eighties as the Iron Lady after whom my favourite lipstick was named: electric blue eyeliner and matching mascara, worn with a heavily frosted magenta lips, stripes of peach blusher and beige foundation with the obligatory tidemark at chin level. I was bang on trend, but looked utterly dreadful. Thinking about it still makes me shudder and the current and entirely un-ironic eighties revival has done nothing to rehabilitate the look for me.


Still, in one's Miss Selfridge years, one cares less about looking good than looking grown-up and trendy. The best part of thirty years later, the situation is completely reversed: the Barbara Cartland experience has taught me that high-fashion beauty looks must be approached with caution and, since I no longer anticipate difficulty if I attempt to buy fags or booze, looking older than my years has very much lost its appeal.


So where was I? Ah yes, I had promised , back in January, to talk about anti-aging make-up tricks. I also remember promising to post more often, but Real Life got in the way. I can't offer any short cuts - make-up that works hard tends to be hard work rather than the kind you can jab into your eye on the tube - but it will take at least five years off.

[Apologies to anyone reading this who's either under thirty five, or a man - it'll most likely bore the pants off you.]

Anyway. The basic problem as one gets older is not the lines and sagging as much as the ghastly, washed-out, careworn and tired look that develops. It's as if the cumulative effect of several decades of late nights appears all at once, and no amount of plastering on Guerlain's Midnight Secret or Clarin's Beauty Flash Balm or Lauder's Advanced Night Repair seems to make a difference. Young skin, it seems, has something almost oxymoronic: even skintone and colour. Harrumph, I say, staring despairingly at myself in the mirror, I look knackered and slightly dusty, like something on a shelf in the Oxfam shop. Dear readers, if you feel the same, I'm afraid there's no alternative than to find yourself a decent foundation: unless you have some kind of genetic miracle going on, there comes a point when flawless skin cannot be faked without it.


1.Foundation/Concealer
The trick is to find one with the right consistency: one that's not so thick it looks old-fashioned and collects in the troughs of all one's wrinkles, but which offers enough coverage to make skin look more even, conceals dark shadows under the eyes and glides over blemishes or incipient broken veins is key. Estee Lauder's Doublewear Light is the best I've found for the money (£24.50) - it doesn't settle in any lines, and nor does it need powder. I need something extra under the eyes (including on the outer corners, where there's some redness, and at the inner corners on either side of my nose: the blue shadows seem to have seeped up there too). Laura Mercier's Secret Camouflage is a product of great genius - you mix the colours to the right shade with a finger and pat it on. It's not drying, so it doesn't emphasise the, hem-hem, laughter lines. Use it after foundation, so you don't use more than you need. If you're still a devotée of Touche Eclat, get someone to take your picture with flash photography: reverse panda is not a good look.

Magazines will always tell you that foundation must be applied with brushes, or those odd triangular sponges. Nonsense: Fingers are perfectly fine. The secret is to put it on the back of one's hand, dot it over your face with finger tips and then blend lightly from the middle outwards.

A note on mineral powder: my guru in all things, India Knight, swears by it, but like Face Goop, I'm not convinced its for me.

2.Colour

I never thought I'd use bronzer, being pale and not always very interesting, and don't ask me why it makes you look younger, but it does. Swirl a very small amount round the outside of the face and take it under the cheekbones. You don't want to look like Kate O'Mara, obviously, but it warms everything up. Grin like an idiot at yourself in the mirror and put a pinky pink blusher like Bobbi Brown's Slopes (£16.50) on the apples of your cheeks, blending it all in. Voilá - most very extremely youthifying.


3. Definition
Ignore the Givenchy bleached brow - you'll see it touted by beauty editors this summer as a key trend, but thin, weedy, pale eyebrows are very ageing. Mine are white blond naturally, but where would we all be if we put nature in front of nurture? A strong brow gives the face definition and helps 'lift' the eye. I get mine dyed at Benefit and give them a little dusting over with a little mouse-brown eyeshadow, but even naturally dark brows benefit from a little additional colour - Laura Mercier's Brow Powder duo is wonderful and lasts forever. A tiny dab of very pale highlighter (subtly used) just under the arch of the brow also helps to fake a bit of brow-lift. Eyeliner, particularly the gel liner sort that stays put, should be worn inside the top rim of the eyelid, pushing it close into the upper lashes. This gives the illusion of lusher lashes, which sadly seem to have got a little weedier looking than they used to be.
The easiest anti-aging eye-shadow is pretty neutral - a brown smokey eye seems to be very now, but it can easily look muddy and tired. Amethyst grey - Giorgio Armani Shade 12 for example - makes a good alternative neutral, blended just above the eye socket, but under the brow bone (worn in the eye socket it makes your eyes look sunken - instant zombie effect). It goes without saying that products with a lot of sparkle or shimmer can emphasise any nascent crepiness. As for mascara, it's black all the way - all the Dior ones are fabulous, as is anything from Lancome, especially Hypnose and the new oscillating one. Wipe the excess off the brush with a tissue before applying - much as I love Pauline Prescott, hers is not the eyelash look to aspire to.


5. Other young stuff
Lip liner stops lip colour bleeding, and drawn carefully just on the edge of the lipline, can also make lips look fuller (full lips = instant youngness). Obviously, it's essential that if you're going to do this, the lip liner must match your natural lip colour exactly, and should then be smudged very gently with a finger so that you avoid the Whatever Happened to Baby Jane look.
Lip gloss is good - again it makes the lips look fuller - but I can't stand the way my hair gets stuck to it if the wind blows.

My other tip is to only ever be photographed in an extremely complimentary light, and ruthlessly delete any pictures don't show you looking fabulous. In years to come, you'll forget that wasn't how you looked every day.


Here is an absurdly flattering picture of me in my 'look younger makeup', though I've slightly over-done the blusher: I'm far too vain to give you a 'before' picture, but if you really want to see what I look like without the slap, click here...

I GROW OLD...I GROW OLD...I SHALL WEAR THE BOTTOMS OF MY TROUSERS ROLLED

I can no longer pretend to be young. I celebrate my birthday in tacit agreement that no one will be so ill-mannered to enquire as to the particular anniversary, and Mr Trefusis has kindly taught Trefusis Minor to tell everyone that I'm thirty-five. But then, as Oscar Wilde once wrote, 'no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating'.

I've been gazing at my aging navel lately. Time slips through my fingers, yet winds itself around the body. I find I can no longer defy the signs of aging, despite the exortations to do so from the Olay adverts. Some of it is insidious, like the slow contagion of reading glasses amongst my closest friends: our book group has been meeting for more than fifteen years, yet in the last six months, I've noticed that as soon as we start talking about the latest book, seven pairs of spectacles are simultaneously repositioned on noses. Some of it is merely the inevitable triumph of comfort over style: no one my age ever bothers to try and walk anywhere in taxi shoes - we simply adopt a large enough handbag in which to hide the spare flats, and hop back into the heels round the corner from the destination. The list of aging evidence is seemingly endless. Oh, God - everything - modern music is just TOO LOUD, particularly in clothes shops, and I wore all the fashions the first time round. I even found myself looking longingly at a KitchenAid mixer in the John Lewis catalogue - the last time I looked longingly at anything in region of four hundred quid, it was a pair of killingly high raspberry-glacé Louboutins. Actually, I'm not dead yet: they're much nicer than a KitchenAid, and just as inaccessibly priced.

Until shamefully recently, I was rabidly anxious about getting older: I loathed the creeping lines on my face, and my white, skinny, Ancient Mariner hands. I hated myself for both being absurdly perked up by a shout of 'Oy! Darlin'!' from White-Van-Man and for resenting the fact that I was no longer the woman at the party the men wanted to talk to. I felt the missed opportunities of youth too keenly: I longed to get back the time when life was all potential, when it was still a rehearsal. I wanted to smash something when Kazuo Ishiguro said that it dawned on him that most of the literary masterpieces had been written by people under forty. So I pretended to myself that it wasn't happening: I grew my hair defiantly long. I had vats of botox pumped into my forehead. The effects were superficial: I was still the same person inside.

But lately, there has been rather a change. I am, for the first time in my life, genuinely bien dans ma peau.

What happened? Well, on the vanity front, money got tighter and so I gave up Botox. My self-esteem didn't fall the same distance as my brow and it made me ponder a while on the current vogue for a one-size-fits-all ideal of grown-up beauty (yes, Nicole Kidman, Madonna, Kylie Minogue et al, I'm talking about you), particularly after visiting an eminent cosmetic dermatologist for work and hearing about an experimental rejuvenating treatment involving sucking out your own fat, harvesting the stem cells from it and then reinjecting it into your face at a cost of nearly eight thousand pounds. Is it just me, or does that sound really quite horrid? It sent me scuttling into google to look at images of beautiful ancients. Lauren Bacall (above) is no stranger to sun and cigarettes, yet still manages to look rather fabulous. The face I want at seventy is one which reflects the wisdom and character that time has built, rather than the skill of a cosmetic surgeon.

Yet, it's not just about conquering my besetting sin: I think the revolution about the way I feel about myself has had an awful lot to do with the therapeutic qualities of writing this blog (and lovely twitter, to which I'm still addicted). It's not only that it's given me an identity outside the - admittedly lovely - ones I already occupy as wife, mother, career-kind-of-person, but it's also introduced me to the whole glorious world of the internets - the burgeoning blog-roll down the side of Mrs Trefusis is testament to the quantity and quality of fascinating minds out there in the ether.

And most of all, I hear the words of Virginia Woolf echo in my head - 'One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.' - and feel reconciled and content.

THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

How on earth did Anna Wintour manage it for all those years? And how does Bono cope? And come to think of it, even Victoria 'Posh' Beckham?
The wearing of dark glasses in conditions other than bright sunshine is extremely counter-intuitive. It's hard to pull off when indoors, makes one very self-conscious, not to mention a danger to oneself and passers by at night, and looks incongruous when it's grey and overcast.

However, somewhere hovering around its edges is the idea that it’s also glamorous and enigmatic, and not a little film-starrish. One can't quite help but to stride around confidently yet warily, as if the paparazzi were lurking behind every bush and bollard. But like smoking – which, in the days when I did it magically made me over as Jean Seberg in Au Bout De Souffle - it’s a faux-allure: neither smoking nor sunglasses effects a Hollywood transformation, it merely makes one faintly ridiculous.


Anyway, my sunglasses aren't welded to my head because I'm trying to develop a mystique. Nor have I become an overnight sensation. I'm merely trying to disguise the grimness of my appearance so I don't frighten small children, perfect strangers or my colleagues. For the last four weeks, I’ve suffered from one eye infection after the other, each more grotesque than the last, with new, unimaginable rococo flourishes in the form of monstrous swellings and suppurating buboes. The not-wearing of makeup was bad enough - I could just about survive that with my amour-propre intact - but the ghastly disfiguring redness, swelling and pustular excrescences can only be disguised by glasses large enough for Jackie O.

In truth, it’s my own fault. Mr Trefusis told me that Hunca-Munca had been lobbing my makeup down the loo, but was unable to be specific about what had gone that way. Helpfully, he fished it out yet the tainted items somehow ended up jumbled in with the rest of my vast collection of beauty products and, unable to distinguish toxic from perfectly wearable, I was loathe to chuck out several hundred pounds worth of extremely fabulous upscale warpaint. I did start with a course of topical antibiotics, but was too idle to complete the course. Repeat this sentence several times until you understand the full scale of the self-inflicted stupidity of the thing.

Eventually, I end up at the optician, thinking I’ve done myself some permanent damage, and in a fit of churning anxiety at the idea of never again being able to wear eye makeup: either having to live with looking mouse-eyed and insignificant, or making an eccentric virtue out of the wearing of dark glasses forever more. But no, fears groundless etc, I have merely to devote myself with renewed vigour to another, stronger course of antibiotics and not give up on it this time after a few days once the symptoms have disappeared.

However, as a side story to all of this, the visit to the opticians has yielded quite a different return: having had perfect eyesight all my life, I discover I need glasses. And worse, the Optician says cheerily 'Don't worry Madam, it happens to everyone - it's just to do with getting older'. I restrain myself from clouting him with something hard and heavy. Reader, you can inject industrial amounts of botox into your forehead, but once reading glasses are prescribed, there’s no disguising your real age.

Oscar Wilde once remarked that London was full of women who’d been 35 for years, and I’ve been inclined to agree. Yet with my fabulous new Bulgari frames parked on my face as I stare at this screen - delighted to be able see what I'm typing - appearances are giving the lie to my lies. Ho Hum.

ON BEAUTY

I'm in with Preema again so she can check the efficacy of the new super-strength British botox she jabbed into my forehead the other week. Apparently, original Botox isn't up to the job of paralysing my super-strength British muscles, pulsing as they are with the bold, sturdy genes that strode up Everest in a pair of stout boots and a Harris tweed jacket. So she's been experimenting with something so fabulously toxic that normal muscles sink into a sullen torpor at the merest whisper of its name. But my forehead is still putting up an unseemly fight, like some long forgotten SOE operative. She decides I need topping up with even more poison and I swear I hear her hiss 'Resistance is futile' into my brow line as she advances towards my unrepentant wrinkles with an enormous vial and even bigger needle.

Actresses pay Sebagh et al small fortunes for partial paralysis - enough to look young and fabulous under sympathetic lighting, but not so much as would take the Oscar potential out of the performance. I'm too tired to offer up an Oscar worthy anything 24/7. But I do have cogent business and personal reasons why I don't want to show any negative emotion whatsoever. Impassive would do it. Inscrutable would be even better. It worked for Diane de Poitiers, who wielded her power and allegedly maintained youthful good looks by never letting the slightest emotion register on her face. Quite how she did this without the aid of injectables I have no idea. But there's something to be said for the power conferred by an immobile face. The nuclear-powered botox had better be the answer.

All my life I've been cursed with a Roger Moore eyebrow. I don't want to raise one eyebrow quizzically: it's all right for Romantic Heroes and Sir Roger, but on me it not only gives me shocking horizontal forehead lines, it also makes me look at people like I think they're mad. Or stupid. Or worse. At the very least, this involuntary quirk makes me look as if I'm expressing mild disbelief and believe me, in this economic climate it's not good for the Managing Director to think you're questioning a decision. To be fit for business in 2009, one should look like one could achieve the impossible for the ungrateful, single-handedly waging war on recession armed only with a pair of sharpened Rupert Sandersons and a 'can-do' attitude. Exhausting. I can't possibly manage that amount of 'Captain of the Netball team' enthusiasm, and even if I could, my left eyebrow would denounce me, raising itself into my hairline in an unbecomingly cynical manner. All I can manage is to deny readability. We don't realise how much we rely on reading people's faces, until those faces become unreadable. Applause junkies work harder if they're not fed with tacit approval. The inclined to criticise climb down, because you appear unaffected by their judgements. Bad news is received with apparent equanimity. Good news the same.

It's not just in the workplace that showing one's feelings is a hazard. At home my face seems to have set itself in the disagreeable lines of the permanently disgruntled and dissatisfied. Curiously, this isn't a true reflection on the inner workings of my head - fundamentally I'm content - but Mr Trefusis has registered the constant scowl and is disobliged to cajole me out of a black humour, choosing instead to play it back to me with some special features of his own. One of us will have to break out of this mexican stand off and stop glowering and start smouldering instead. Much more fun. And if muscle paralysis is the simplest quick fix and an easy shortcut to rebooting the mood chez Trefusis, sign me up for a lifetime's supply.

It seems that changing the look on my face is the best I can muster right now in the way of managing my world. My first attempt at botox only confirmed to me that a smoother expression begets a smoother life. Pray God I'm not resistant to this variant too.

This is not, then, about the pursuit of youth, but the pursuit of peace: Sanity not vanity.

Dr Preema Vig MBBS MRCGP. Preema@gmail.com. 02079385488