In praise of wrinkles

IF ever I'd put women on a pillar, seeing them as much the more practical, sensible sex, yesterday that pillar crumbled away. "Can you imagine," I said to the intelligent, civilised and sophisticated woman I was having lunch with, "the kind of women out there who are actually prepared to put themselves through courses of Botox injections to take out their wrinkles and make themselves look like Barbie dolls?"

"Yes," she said shortly. "I can't think of anything I'd like more. If I wasn't worried about possible health side-effects, I'd go and get Botox injections today. Who doesn't want to look glamorous?"

Am I missing something? Botox is for middle-aged women - the US regulators won't let Botox promoters use models under 40 - and the truly glamorous older woman is one whose face shows, with a few elegant lines around the eyes and mouth, that they have lived interestingly. Look at Julie Christie or Catherine Deneuve when they were in early middle-age, or that wonderful actress Liv Ullman whose award-winning movie performances, with Bergman's camera constantly close upon on her expressive face, would have been impossible with the paralysed muscles and facial sheen which repeat users of Botox tend to have.

Glamorous? What is glamorous about a face which ought to be interestingly lived-in but instead looks as clear and ignorant as a baby's on top of a wrinkled neck?

Tell me what is glamorous about a Botox-injected face which looks as if it can never have smiled or laughed or wept or wrinkled its nose in 40-odd years of being alive, because the little wrinkles which should be there to give the face individuality and expression are simply missing?

The aim, I suppose, is to ape the appearance of Hollywood film celebrities, who already go through life applying a battery of cosmetics to protect their faces from the limited range of emotions they are encouraged to express on screen.

It is reminiscent of the book (and film) The Stepford Wives in which, to please their husbands, the women aimed for a doll-like perfection of face, clothes, kitchens, lawns, housework, until they all turned into mannequins - except that Ira Levin's book was a feminist satire, and women using Botox today do so to please themselves.

Botox has its uses. It helps cure squints and the muscle spasms of cerebral palsy sufferers; it has even helped paralysed children to walk.

As a cosmetic, injected under the skin in the way that corpses are, it destroys the chemical that sends impulses from the brain to the muscles of the face - supposing that all Botox users have sufficient brain to send impulses that far in the first place.

The face is the greatest glory of the human body. Faces are the books and windows of the mind, each one different, each one revealing. We are trained from birth, from watching our mother's face, to pick up the minute muscle movements which send out messages of tenderness, irritation, amusement, uncertainty, surprise. I should not like to be the babe in arms of a mother who had just come back from Boots after her Botox treatment: I should be able to read her eyes but not her face.

So here's to wrinkles, the sign of a good, honest, lived-in face. Here's to laughter lines around the mouth and eyes; here's to lines on the forehead which can express the polite frown of annoyance which does not need words to back it up.

How you frown, or try to frown, with a derivative of clostridium botulinum paralysing your forehead, I can't imagine.

The miserable truth is that, in fitness and cosmetic matters, where women lead men often follow, and I can foresee the day when the streets of London are full of men and women with cheeks and brows as smooth as babies' bottoms, their eyes flitting expressionlessly as they recognise a friend. Eventually the truth will dawn, that glamour is literally skin-deep, and the more time people spend on Botox injections, collagen implants and peeling treatments in order to look the way everybody else does, the less they are being themselves.

And when that happens, people will pay to return to the "individual" look.

Wrinkles will be in great demand, and will be available, at a cost, after a course of treatments at wrinkle clinics and assorted chains of chemists. And people like me will be right back in fashion again.

Copyright 2002
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