When face and figure don't add up (From Watford Observer)

When face and figure don't add up

10:57am Monday 1st February 2010

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)

Last week, as I stared despondently at the form reflected back at me in the bedroom mirror I was reminded of a bit advice I once received from Dame Barbara Cartland.

Enthroned on something plushly pink and gold in the living room of her stately Hatfield home, the great dame had scrutinised my 20-something features and pronounced: “Of course, you know that after the age of 40, a woman has to choose between her face and her figure.”

Babs revealed that “like all sensible women” she had chosen her face, which was a bit of a disappointment to be honest, because quite apart from the industrial strength make-up holding her features together, I swear that I could see bits of Sellotape sticking out from under the edge of her wig.

I suspect that she was using it to hold back the ravages of time as a sort of do-it-yourself facelift.

To be fair, the authoress was well past her 80th birthday and despite the faintly Miss Havisham-esque effect produced by the cloud of rosy chiffon in which she was dressed and the even pinker pan stick which she had presumably employed a plasterer to apply, her mind was as sharp as a rapier carried by one of her dashing Regency heroes.

It had become apparent to me during the early stage of our interview that, even as an octogenarian, Dame Barbara was a man’s woman.

Perched on a little gilt chair in the midst of her flower-bedecked drawing room, I tried my best to interest her, only to have every question batted away with, at best, a disdainful one-word answer and at worst (because it was really very unsettling to see all that make-up on the move) a raised eyebrow.

It was only when our male photographer arrived and started bustling about the room to find the best angle that Babs came alive. As the pair of them bantered away about the weather and the terrible traffic, I was certain that she was flirting with him.

She giggled away and called him a ’dear boy’ as he arranged her into the most flattering pose, while just five minutes earlier she’d been as miserable as sin.

As I listened to Babs and our photographer nattering away about soft light and the importance of tone and background colour to really flatter a woman, I realised that what she really enjoyed talking about wasn’t her books, but herself.

Consequently, when we resumed our fireside chat about half an hour later when the photographer had moved on to a cheque presentation in Radlett, I changed tack and asked how she managed to remain so incredibly youthful.

This turned out to be exactly the sort of question Dame Barbara liked to be asked and for the next 40 minutes or so she held forth, hardly pausing to draw breath, on the age-defying properties of vitamins, facial exercises, regular skin treatments involving some frankly alarming ingredients and the wrinkle-busting importance of “always being in love“.

About half way through this monologue, Babs narrowed her eyes to assess my face (I think she was trying to focus, but I still can’t be sure that it wasn’t the weight of the false eyelashes giving her gyp) and made her pronouncement about the terrible choice lying in wait for ladies of a certain age.

At the time, I must admit that I didn’t take much notice, but recently her words have come back to haunt me.

As I stood in front of the bedroom mirror last week I realised that there was a horrible disparity between my face and my figure.

I’m quite lucky to have reached my mid-40s without developing deep lines and wrinkles on my face - yet. I think this is mainly due to not ever smoking and keeping my highly flammable skin out of the sun.

Just after Christmas I had lunch with a friend who is a beauty journalist and who, by her own admission, seems to have had pretty much every treatment going in the name of holding back the years.

After she’d finished a particularly eye-watering account of having her nasio-labial folds painfully injected with plumping collagen, she scrutinised my pale freckled face and said “You really ought to look a lot older you know, for someone with your skin.”

Warming to her theme, and practically forgetting that I was sitting there inside the skin in front of her, she went on to make a professional assessment of the state of my face with a forensic detachment that I assume she’d picked up from the cosmetic surgery experts she’d interviewed over the years.

“Yes - you really should look a lot more wrinkly than you do,“ she concluded, adding thoughtfully, “But then again, you do drink a lot of red wine and that’s full of antioxidants which really slow down the aging process. Although, of course, alcohol is just full of empty calories.”

Her eyes moved from my Dorian Gray features, to my Queen Victoria waistline and I think she winced.

Like Dame Barbara, but without actually realising it, at some point over the last five years I seem to have chosen my face over my figure.

Obviously I am not absurdly youthful, I’m just overweight and all that excess blubber is filling out the wrinkles.

You only have to look at actress Hannah Waterman, who recently shed half her body (and apparently most of her soul) to produce a fitness video, to see the high price paid by those who suddenly develop the body of a 20-year-old; they also develop the face of a 70-year-old because nature is cruel but fair.

Anyway, as this seems to be a bumper year for weddings among my friends and family, I’ve definitely got to take action on the fat-front to ensure that I can go out and buy a neat posh frock that makes me feel like an extra from Mad Men rather than a case study from Britain’s Fattest Children.

I’ll be giving up alcohol for Lent as usual and I’ll definitely be taking more exercise, but I’m determined to take it gradually.

Everything I’ve recently read about crash diets, sudden exercise and rapid weight loss suggest that although you might end up with the body of Cheryl Cole, you also end up with the face of Dot Cotton and, as Dame Barbara would agree, that’s not a good look in anyone’s book.

*****

How thrilling that former Post Office supremo Adam Crozier has been appointed chairman of ITV. Does this mean that we won’t get the news until mid-afternoon now?

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Comments(0)