Helen's. READ MORE:Seeing my jowly, wrinkled 55-year-old face and turkey neck looking mockingly back at me from the video call on my phone screen — a disturbing mix of the woman I once was and my mother during her twilight years — was bad enough.
Nor would I want to turn back the clock to when I was her age — I’m far too tired to ‘do it all again’. But what’s more important to me is that Isobel knows we have a choice — and that includes gilding the lily. So, I returned to dermatologist Dr Leah Totton, who performed my procedure back in 2014, to see if there was any hope of recreating the same results now.
But Leah assured me that I’d be slathered in anaesthetic cream beforehand and prescribed a 2mg dose of diazepam — what a doctor might recommend for an anxious passenger before a flight — 20 minutes before each treatment. Determined to stay the course and get the full effects, I counted down the seconds until the 20-minute treatment was finally over.
While I’d been told not to expect to see much improvement after the first treatment, I was instantly less jowly and my jawline more visible than it had been in years. Even my husband, Dillon, who is not known for his observational skills, said I looked ‘fresh-faced’. I could see why a course of three such treatments, which alone cost £2,700, is enough for those who are squeamish about having their face ‘sewn’, as mine already looked tauter and plumper.
Like childbirth, I’d clearly blanked out the less pleasant details of the previous one, but Dr Leah reminded me that the local anaesthetic she injected into my face to numb it before inserting the threads had, last time, left me shaking uncontrollably. Four threads were inserted in each cheek, plus two on either side of my neck — and once all eight were all in place, Dr Leah tugged at them.Although I’d prepared myself for a long stint of ‘mindful breathing’, Dr Leah is quite the seamstress — the most experienced thread-lift doctor in the UK, she tells me — and the whole procedure was completed within 20 minutes.
Mine now felt so tight that, once the threads had been cut, I was almost afraid to look at myself in a mirror in case I’d morphed into Donatella Versace, who is no stranger to the surgeon’s knife.