‘I’ve had 750 shots of Botox and £100,000 of ‘tweakments’ but please don’t call me vain, without them I’d look like this!’ AI-generated image shows how ALICE HART-DAVIS would look naturally without a career being a guinea pig for the anti-ageing industry
These days it’s not fashionable to admit caring about how you look as you age. There is a growing mood among the 50+ sisterhood to embrace ageing and all the frown lines, jowls and grey hair it brings.
A pro-age stance, decrying Botox and fillers and railing against the impossible beauty standards set by the cult of celebrity, is the trend-setting ‘take’ instead.
But here’s the thing. I’ve just turned 60 and I have absolutely no interest in ageing gracefully.
I don’t want to let the entirely natural processes of bone loss, fat loss and gravitational sagging do their worst — and I don’t have to. Because now there is an alternative path.
I look a good 15 years younger than I am because I stumbled into the world of cosmetic medicine 25 years ago, when this peculiar area was in its infancy. Ever since, I’ve been reporting on and trialling treatments.
ALICE HART-DAVIS: I look a good 15 years younger than I am because I stumbled into the world of cosmetic medicine 25 years ago, when this peculiar area was in its infancy. Ever since, I’ve been reporting on and trialling treatments
It has been my passion and my bread and butter. Any treatment you care to name, I’ve been one of the first journalists in Britain to give it a whirl.
What have I tried? What haven’t I tried! Fillers, Botox, lasers, skin peels? Of course. Skin-tightening ultrasound and radiofrequency, with and without microneedling? Naturally.
All the cutting-edge sci-fi anti-agers where they take plasma from your own blood, blend it into a syringe of hydrating hyaluronic acid and inject the lot back into you, or extract fat from your thighs, mix it up with stem-cell extracts and use it to pad out your hollow cheeks? You bet.
I’ve had more than 350 anti- ageing treatments, including around 750 shots of Botox and 50 syringes of filler. And if I’d paid for all of that, which I didn’t, it would have cost me well over £100,000.
I know this sounds mad, possibly dangerous, but I have had the huge privilege of access to the very best in the business right from the start — the doctors, nurses, surgeons, dentists and dermatologists who develop the techniques that become industry standards.
They have let me interview them, watch procedures and quiz them on every aspect of their work. And when they needed a guinea pig or a demo model, I’ve been there, usually with a photographer in tow.
Young colleagues would squeal and flinch when I described what I’d been up to, insisting they would never resort to such desperate measures.
I would smile tightly (and not just because of the filler), desperate to say, ‘Just wait until you’re nearly 40 and see the lines and hollows and weariness settling in on your face. You, too, might start to wonder, would it be so bad to give this stuff a try?’
Yes, I’m vain, but even more than that, I’m curious. What fascinated me from the start was the way these procedures allow us to manage how we look as we age.
In the yawning gap between skincare in a pot and a full-on facelift, there used to be no options. Now there are myriad ones.
ALICE HART-DAVIS: Actually, I know what I’d look like au naturel because I commissioned a forensic artist to create a special portrait of me. Auriole Prince, the founder of AI technology company changemyface.com, is FBI-trained in the detail of facial ageing and has a strong interest in how our lifestyle and tweakments can affect the way we look
What puzzles many people is that, having tried so many treatments, I don’t look like a waxwork or an alien. Most critics hold a firm belief that any cosmetic work is obvious and usually looks bad.
The reason I escaped the ‘trout pout’ and the taut, waxy look is that I learnt two key lessons early on: you always need an expert practitioner and you have to know when to stop.
We have all seen what happens to those who don’t adhere to these rules but lose their sense of perspective and keep having just a little bit more, until they look like caricatures of their former selves.
It’s bad work that gets noticed.
Most of us don’t clock the best aesthetic work because it’s invisible. Think of all the famous faces that have barely aged in the past 20 years.
Do you seriously think that’s because they all do yoga, drink green juice and cleanse with olive oil? Wise up! Their faces have been as meticulously managed as their wardrobes and hairstyles and exercise regimens.
Tweakments may have a terrible image — partly because of the dire lack of regulation in the UK, which means non-medics can offer treatments with impunity.
But what I know is that there is a lot of impressive work done by great practitioners, doctors and dermatologists who make their patients look like their best selves.
It’s that sort of work, and that type of practitioner, that I am at pains to flag up in my articles.
If you quiz people on their motivation for having an anti-ageing treatment, they rarely say they want to look younger, though that is the net effect. What they want is to look ‘well’ and ‘rested’ — less tired, less angry, less sad. They want what they see in the mirror to tally with how they feel inside.
Which tweakments work the hardest? The ones everyone has heard of — they are popular because they work. Botox relaxes muscles and softens frown lines. Intense pulsed light (IPL) and lasers zap age spots and pigmentation.
Microneedling, especially combined with radiofrequency, is great for improving skin texture and, like ultrasound and plasma treatments, boosts collagen production in the skin.
Injectable moisturiser treatments such as Profhilo and Skinboosters give ageing skin back the glow and plumpness that vanishes with the years.
Fillers redefine facial contours, replace lost volume and can last a long time, as I found out when I had an MRI scan of my face after nearly four years without any filler injections.
READ MORE: ‘I’ve got 20 years of filler stuck in my face’: It’s meant to dissolve over two years – but in an investigation that will shock any woman tempted by ‘tweakments’ – Alice’s MRI scan revealed the extraordinary truth
Technically, the filler should have all broken down and vanished, as most hyaluronic acid-based fillers rarely last longer than a year. But there was lots of the stuff still in there, exactly where it was placed.
There is a common myth that 60 is the cut-off point for the most popular tweakments — that Botox ‘doesn’t work’ past this age, and that filler ‘looks weird’ or ‘leaves gaps in your skin’.
‘Should I be stopping with all this?’ I asked Dr Sophie Shotter, one of London’s top cosmetic doctors, last week as she whisked around my face with a syringe of toxin. She shook her head.
‘As we age, we lose collagen in the skin and we lose both fat and bone in the face — the actual shape of the skull changes — and by the time we hit 60, these changes are often more marked. Fillers can be a superb tool to help restore the framework of the face and maintain a good facial structure.
‘Combining this with skin treatments to boost levels of collagen in the skin, and potentially Botox to help soften lines and wrinkles and address any muscle imbalances, can absolutely look age-appropriate, yet refreshed.’
Phew.
The one thing I’ve been obliged to give up has been lip filler, after a lip expert told me my philtrum — the bit from the Cupid’s bow to the nose — has lengthened with age and if I have any more filler put in, the saggy lip will just stick forward, which is not a good look. So I’ll stick with lip gloss from now on.
If I appear to be taking these procedures — medical procedures, let’s not forget — too casually, let me assure you I’m hugely aware that things can and do go wrong, even when you’re in good hands. And yes, things have gone wrong.
A list of the worst would include the breast-filler injections (since discontinued) that took me up a cup size but later set into rocky lumps. The nerve-freezing ‘Botox alternative’ that paralysed half my forehead for months.
The protective inside-the-eyelid shields, used during a laser procedure, that ripped large patches of epithelium (the outer layer of tissue) off my eyeballs, resulting in several months in bed with some sort of PTSD-induced breakdown. (Random bad luck, I was told. It was agony for days and I couldn’t open my eyes without anaesthetic drops.)
But I have no regrets. I’m sure the way I look is one of the reasons I don’t feel old — and I’m not treated like an old person by other people, either.
‘You don’t move like you’re 60,’ observed a younger friend who teaches yoga. That’s because I do a lot of exercise.
In my 20s, it was about staying in shape, in my 30s and 40s about managing an increasingly bad back, but for the past ten years I’ve been driven by the sure knowledge that it’s use-it-or-lose-it when it comes to strength, muscle mass, balance and mobility.
I dislike weights but do two sessions a week with a trainer and love the confidence physical strength gives me.
I also do lots of yoga, and am endlessly amused and grateful that my body is more agile and flexible now than when I was young, simply as a result of showing up on the mat time after time for 20 years.
Keep at it, said another yoga teacher friend. ‘You want to stay strong because there’s nothing more ageing than going ‘Oof’ as you collapse into an armchair.’
Curiously, this sort of hard effort to not let my body slide naturally into decrepitude elicits praise from other people, in exactly the way that my efforts to keep my face in order don’t.
Yes, I eat healthily most of the time, but I’m not going to wave away crisps, pain au raisins or birthday cake when they come my way. I’ve always loved alcohol but find it just doesn’t work for me any more — the initial buzz is less, I get a headache within a few hours and feel dozy the next morning, so I don’t indulge nearly as much.
I don’t dress like a 60-year-old, either. My shape and size haven’t changed over the years and I prefer to keep my hair long and blonde, although the white roots seem to come through faster now.
Plus, much to my surprise, I’m still employable. When I began writing about beauty in the 1990s, I thought I would have a short shelf-life — back then, glossy-mag beauty editors were put out to grass once they turned 40.
But to my amazement, I now have my own website with a highly engaged online following who want to know everything about tweakments. No one is telling me to shut up and stay at home — if anything, readers are even more obsessed with what I’m doing to beat the ageing process.
I have no intention of retiring; is that also because of the way I look? It may well be. I’m a firm believer that confidence in your looks — or at least, knowing you don’t look washed out and exhausted — does wonders for your enjoyment of life.
Aside from looks, I’m working on my attitude to ageing. You would be forgiven for thinking that I’m ‘anti’ ageing per se — but let me assure you, I do appreciate that it’s a privilege to age. You don’t reach your seventh decade without being acutely aware of the friends who didn’t get that far.
I have also read Dr Becca Levy’s fascinating book Breaking The Age Code, which details her research showing how negative beliefs about ageing influence the kind of health issues we think are just inevitable, such as hearing loss. One of the best ways to stay mentally and physically fit, she shows, is to rethink your stereotypes of what it means to be an older person.
Looking ahead, I can’t honestly see myself giving up tweakments. I rely on regular shots of toxin to soften the muscles that clench my jaw while I’m asleep and make my neck stringy, and to smooth frown lines. I like an occasional spot of filler to pack back in the volume that life and age strip away.
I’ve got a list as long as my arm of new procedures I want to try — from EMface, which is non-invasive and sculpts the face by toning up the cheek and forehead musles, via NeoGen Plasma (the high-tech energy treatment that worked wonders for Strictly judge Shirley Ballas) to a new neck-rejuvenating procedure using very diluted collagen-stimulating filler . . .
Some kind people message me saying, ‘You look great, you really don’t need to do all these things to your face!’ What they don’t seem to realise is that it’s only because I have so many treatments that I look the way I do.
I mean, what would I look like if I hadn’t done all this? I was discussing this with a friend from college who burst out laughing, saying, ‘You’d look like me!’ And she had a point. She’s still lovely — but she has a fair complexion with more than its fair share of wrinkles and age spots, and her jawline has vanished into her neck.
Actually, I know what I’d look like au naturel because I commissioned a forensic artist to create a special portrait of me. Auriole Prince, the founder of AI technology company changemyface.com, is FBI-trained in the detail of facial ageing and has a strong interest in how our lifestyle and tweakments can affect the way we look.
If I gave her a current picture and a list of all the stuff I’ve had done over the years, could she subtract the aesthetic benefits and show me what my face ought to look like?
You can see the result in the picture on this page, with all the pigmentation patches, set-in lines, sagging eyes and deflated cheeks that Mother Nature had in store for me. Nothing wrong with it, but I prefer the way I look in real life.
Seriously, though, how long will I see fit to keep it all up? For as long as it seems a good idea. For as long as I can be bothered. For as long as I still look like me, rather than some weird facsimile of myself.
I am tempted by the idea of a facelift, and arrange a catch-up with the outstanding facial cosmetic surgeon Mr Rajiv Grover every year or two, ostensibly for an update on his work but also to say, ‘Hey, is it time?’
I have known him for 20 years and, so far, he has always said no.
By the time he says yes, I may have had an epiphany about the meaning of life, renounced tweakments, cropped off my blonde tresses and gone to practise yoga full-time on a sunny southern shore. But I doubt it.
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