Trying to look young is even scarier than ageing

Illustration by David Foldvari

In June, 51-year-old Michelle Wood, a single mum from the US, became dubiously famous after jetting off to Mexico to buy a new face. She returned looking battered, bruised and at least two decades younger, telling millions on social media how she paid a surgeon for a full facelift, forehead lift, upper bleph, lower bleph, lip lift and a mini chin implant. The result? Other than slightly greying hair and a still downturned mouth, Michelle had eliminated all signs of ageing. Eureka.

“I did not want to look 20,” Michelle explained. “I just want to look like I slept for 30 years.” The full cost of her good night’s sleep was somewhere in the region of $14,000. But who cares, right? She looks great. Uncannily great.

In fact, she looks not unlike the legion of middle-aged A-listers who suddenly look frozen in amber somewhere in their mid-twenties, and who, speculation says, also had facelifts. Fall deep enough into celebrity gossip forums and everyone from Anne Hathaway to Pamela Anderson and Lindsay Lohan are being linked to miracle-worker surgeons who have restored them to their former youthful glory. And, of course, there’s Kris Jenner, whose family has access to the kind of medical tourism others can only dream of, and who looks all of a sudden almost prepubescent. Fighting off accusations that she sold her ageing soul to the devil, Jenner was recently honest about her facelift, and even revealed the name of her surgeon: Dr Steven Levine. His work is estimated to have cost her more than $100,000.

Now listen. As someone who has indulged in a few minor – minor! – tweakments, I am reluctant to judge others who have the urge to improve or change their features as they see fit. But all the same, the emergence of what New York magazine last week called the “Forever-35 Face” as the new flex for the ultra rich makes me feel squeamish. Beauty writers have already heralded a new era of “undetectables”. Gone are the days of gleaming horsey veneers, pillow-y lip fillers and puffed-out cheeks. Now, the way to do plastic surgery is to look like you haven’t done it, and pretend you’ve worn factor 75 sunscreen all your life, when really you just have access to huge amounts of disposable wealth.

Here’s the real secret, though. All of the tweakments we now think are cringe are only cringe to us in the first place because they’re now accessible to the masses. Botox is a couple of hundred quid a pop – and don’t ask me how I know that. Dermal fillers cost around the same price, and you can undercut the price of high-end boob jobs, hair plugs and dental transformations by taking a quick package-deal trip to Turkey.

There’s a snobbery around these kinds of plastic surgeries, while at the same time the business of looking young for ever – whether you’re a tech billionaire harvesting your son’s blood or a 12-year-old already addicted to Drunk Elephant products and with a multi-step skincare routine – is quietly booming. And the pseudoscience and six-figure price tags attached to the new era of plastic surgery is much more to do with smart capital than we might think. Whether we like it or not, it pays to look young, it pays to invest in the process of looking young, and the classic fear of getting past it is not just atavistic, it’s all-encompassing, almost rational.

A slew of recent horror movies invoke the spectre of ageing as the ultimate bogeyman, from The Substance to Villains. That fear is so great that it’s no longer just the preserve of the girlies. Last week, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were overheard on a state visit discussing the benefits of organ harvesting to extend their lives, perhaps indefinitely. “In the past, it used to be rare for someone to be older than 70 and these days they say that at 70 one’s still a child,” Xi’s interpreter was heard telling Putin. He added: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and people can live younger and younger, and even achieve immortality.”

Is this any more sinister than spending the equivalent of someone’s life savings on stretching and yanking back all the skin on your face? I mean yes, obviously it is. But only marginally so. If we’re not careful, we could slide into a future where evil men live for ever and rich women sit beside them looking baby-faced. Not just facially either: apparently the newest cosmetic procedure for the uber wealthy is a “handlift”, so that your veiny, septuagenarian claws won’t end up giving you away to whoever cares enough to look at them.

The rest of us won’t have to bother about this, though. We won’t have the money to join in, unless facelifts become as accessible as lip flips and dermal filler nose jobs. And if they did, of course, the rich wouldn’t want them any more. It’s easy to be dismissive about these kinds of things, to think: “Why should I care about what the current trend in beauty tweakments is?” But look, sadly, we have to care. What we consider hot doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Beauty is, at heart, an expression of luxury. And by the same logic, looking young is a canny investment. We might all be looking ahead into a dystopian, optimised future where our non-existent pension plans have to be blown on trips to Guadalajara. If you want to picture the future of luxury, imagine a boot stamping on a human yet curiously perfectly unlined face. For ever.