Creams not complications

Well happy new year!  Is 2012 looking good? Not perhaps, if ‘Implantgate’ has anything to do with it. Who doesn’t relish the frisson of long-held convictions vindicated? But hand on unaugmented breast, Crone is far from basking in schadenfreude after what must have been a harrowing week’s news for some.

Although I’m thankful it’s never been mine, I have always regarded cosmetic surgery entirely as a matter of choice.  Done expertly by conscientious and experienced surgeons, the uplift goes beyond physical. Yet now it appears that too many practitioners have confirmed the old stereotype of the venal, dilatory doc, cynically exploiting clients’ insecurities, bullshitting over slip-ups and surgical recalls and blatantly dodging the blame. Remember that wickedly wideboy portrayal of the plastic surgeon in Terry Gilliam’s eerily prophetic Brazil?  ‘Just a little complication….’ was the fob-off line swallowed by the gullible, bandaged Mrs Terrain, whose ‘complication had a little complication’ as her lift slid terminally south…

Crone so agrees with Times journalist Janice Turner, who last Saturday accused some cosmetic surgery clinics of behaving as irresponsibly as banks, cashing in on the boom with scant attention to long-term implications.  Now the spotlight’s turning on fillers (permanent ones for now, temporaries watch this space) Crone’s more convinced than ever that penury aside, we haven’t a clue what the ultimate effects of repeated procedures will be, because frankly we’re still in the guinea pig phase. As Turner says, we already know that ‘cosmetic surgery offers spectacular but unsustainable results.’  And if you can’t trust your surgeon’s judgement over what goes under your skin,  what’s the point of risking it anyway?

So as ever, Crone’s sticking to creams. OK, the results aren’t likely to be spectacular, but with a bit of dedication, skin looks and feels better both in the short and long term.

I don’t usually blog about products that haven’t hit the stores yet, but what’s a new year for if not forecasting? I’m particularly excited about soon-to-be-launched formulas from old favourite names, which exemplify the spirit of consolidation rippling through the cosmetics industry right now. Instead of rushing out ‘the next best thing’ on a half-baked theory and shoe-horning yet another ‘step’ into an already heaving regime, smart brands are upgrading their star performers with cutting edge research. For 2012, Clarins have done it with Extra-Firming Day and Night Creams - the UK’s anti-ageing best sellers. When they first launched in 19778, little was known about how chemical messaging can influence stem cells to boost protein links that keep skin firm and flexible - or how green banana extract (really!) boosts results. Inspired by the BB cream trend, Lancôme have multi-tasked their 20 year-old Rénergie range so each cream lifts, firms and de-wrinkles on all skin levels, and brightens too.  Love the 2-in-1 eye tightener with brightening concealer built into the lid! Then there’s Estée Lauder’s Revitalizing Supreme Global Anti-Ageing Creme - a ‘one stop pot’ formulated around Lauder’s research into SIRT-1, the ‘longevity’ gene. This time black bamboo’s the master switch that turns on ‘multiple anti-ageing pathways in the skin.’ Specially designed for European women who can’t be arsed with faddy routines for this and that, its easy melt-in-the-skin texture has a pleasure rating of 20 out of 10. Bang on the money?  Keep it simple is Crone’s 2012 mantra - and don’t trust what you can’t sustain.

• Clarins Extra Firming Day Wrinkle Lifting Cream - All Skin Types and Special for Dry Skin, £46; Extra Firming Day Lifting Lotion SPF15 - All Skin Types, £46; Extra-Firming Night Rejuvenating Cream - All Skin Types and Special for Dry Skin, £48 available from March.  Stockists: 0800 036 3558 or www.clarins.co.uk

• Lancôme Rénergie Multi-Lift Day Cream, SPF15, £60; Eclat Multi-Lift, £39; Yeux Multi-Lift, £46; Yeux, £39 and Nuit Multi-|Lift, £60, at Lancôme counters nationwide from 1^st April.

• Estée Lauder Revitalizing Supreme Global Anti-Ageing Creme, £56, at Estée Lauder counters nationwide and www.esteelauder.com from April.

Whose bones on the throne?

 Cornwall.....

[With apologies to John Betjeman]

It’s awfully well done of Camilla

To think about all of our bones.

What a diligent, duchessly pillar

Of society’s fillies and crones!

Don’t diet!  she wisely advises,

Lest your BMD dwindle to dust.

Ignore skinny slebs in the glossies

Who infer that starvation’s a must….

Well, that’s enough of that. Sincerely though, thumbs up to the Senior Duch on embracing her role as President of the National Osteoporosis Society. As Crone’s know only too well, brittle bones are yet another post-menopausal risk we face - and yes, chronically poor nutrition in earlier life is a contributing factor.  As the Duch puts it in today’s Daily Wail, ‘the link between young girls, eating disorders and osteoporosis is a ticking timebomb,’ and magazines are to blame, she says. ‘You have all these glossy magazines which are read by young girls who then go on a diet and try to be thin to emulate the models they see,’ she believes, adding that mags bear a lot of responsibility in what they write.  Er, well yes, your Duchessness. Thanks for reminding us.  As a beauty journalist of some 40 years standing, I constantly curse my industry for having single-handedly caused national dysmorphia, if not our current anorexia epidemic. Or should that read obesity epidemic?  We in the UK do have the most shocking obesity figures in Europe after all….  

Reading the thoughts of  Chairwoman Camilla on the bus this morning (yes, I know I should have walked off my lard arse, but it was raining) made me wonder where was brittle anorexic fashion journalist Liz Jones? And bingo!  There she was, hating her bones and the business yet again on page 27.  No show without Punch, so they say. But moving swiftly to the crunch,call me a cynical old Crone but is the real baby elephant in Camilla’s room the increasingly willowy and winsome, glossy new Duchess of Dukan?  And do I detect a thinly-veiled swipe at old rival, Diana Superstar into the bargain?  Both have graced more magazine covers than Camilla’s had hot dinners. And do pardon my flimsiness, but I know whose bones I’d rather see on the throne. Now there's a ticking timebomb…..

.... or Cambridge?  You figure.

Keeping up appearances

Hold up:  Senior Crones will appreciate the reference to the bulldog clip

First, apologies for a summer of silence.  Crone has been deep in the throes of ministering to her nonagenarian mother, who sadly fell and broke her arm in July. Senior Crone is now doing tolerably well, but things remain a tad delicate.  Hey, well.  There comes a time in almost all our lives when mothercare takes on a poignant new spin. All the more reason then, to exploit instant and easy ways of putting a brave face on it, eh?

So I’m amused, but not surprised to read Mintel’s latest research has found that (daffy Liz Jones apart) UK women prefer skincare to surgery -  just a teensy 2% resort to the knife these days. Six in 10 women over 65 use products to look better for their age says Mintel, who conclude that taking pride in your looks isn’t just a youth thing.  Well, duh!!!  What planet do they live on? Every Crone worth her creams could have told them that. They go on to share that 57% of women aged 55-64 use skincare to sort out their wrinkles and fine lines and that anti-ageing moisturisers are top of the to-do list . Double duh!!! (Actually, in all my years of beauty writing, I’ve never actually embraced the physiological difference between a line and a wrinkle. Especially when they call them ‘fine’ lines. Are they posher than your bog-standard creases - sort of Waitrose-grade facial fissures? Is a line just wrinkle-in-waiting, like it’s queuing to star in its own close-up? Is one straight and deep and the other, well… crinkly?  Or is it all just marketing semantics…)

Whatever. The range that’s been helping to raise Crone’s spirits (and jowls) over the past weeks is Estée Lauder’s Resilience Lift Firming/Sculpting Collection.  The anti-sagging technology purports to tweak skin’s Sirtuins (so-called longevity genes) into ‘supporting’ collagen, laminin and elastin - proteins which keep skin firm and smooth. Whether Sirtuins actually do increase cell life is controversial - a new study at University College London now suggests they may not. But what Crone finds so uplifting is that Lauder’s refreshing pink Face and Neck Lotion feels reassuringly substantial. The Eye Cream brightens and de-bags without attacking her contact lenses - a rare thing, believe me!  But the real genius is Instant Action Lift Treatment - extra-tightening help dispensed from a flexy rubber spatula which, stroked over your worst nightmares, really does shrink them - albeit temporarily - like cling-film for your wrinkles. Or fine lines. And I swear it keeps my makeup looking braver for longer. Because let’s face it, Crone needs all the help she can get right now… 

• Estée Lauder Resilience Lift Firming/Sculpting Collection. Face and Neck Creme SPF15, and Lotion, both £58. Sculpting Eye Creme, £40. Night Face and Neck Creme, £60. Instant Lift Action Treatment, £45. At Estée Lauder counters nationwide and www.esteelauder.co.uk

Sweet smell of youth

Can a scent make you smell younger,  or does your good old favourite spray give your age away?  This vexing question occurred to Crone as she sniffed new versions of grand old classics currently gracing beauty counters now. 

Thanks to a generous puthering of iris, Chanel No.19 Poudré is a softer and more, well…powdery version of the 1971 original.  Ah, 1971.  Biba,  loons (remember falling over those ludicrous, flapping 22 inch flares?) and the sad demise of Coco Chanel, just months after her 87’th birthday the previous year. 

A green and gamine chypre, Chanel No.19 (Mlle Coco was born on 19^th August) became the bra-burning kid sister to grown-up aldehydic floral No.5.  Nothing sissy about this - Gauloises-puffing intellectuals loved No.19  for its bracing, tomboyish edge. It seems an irony then, that this pioneering ‘youth scent’ should be powdered down for a post-post feminist generation raised on amorphous  fruity florals. But Crone reluctantly admits that pumping up the iris (powdery bit) has put No.19 back on trend in a beautifully suave, easy-on-the-nose kind of way

Around the same time as No.19’s launch, Crone discovered Guerlain’s magnificent oriental, Shalimar.  Created in 1925, the year of the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts (Art Deco) in Paris, exotic Shalimar went perfectly with the ‘20s and ‘30s frocks Crone snapped up from Oxfam. (Can’t get them for love nor money, not even on Portobello these days!).  Crone’s beau de jour never failed to point out that the billows of vanilla reminded him of custard powder.  (Was she apple crumble of his eye? She didn’t stick around long enough to find out). Yet according to Guerlain nose Thierry Wasser, his 17-year-old neice found the original scent intimidating. Fair enough, beneath vanilla’s sweetness lurks a darker, more hormonal vibe.  Vanilla is, after all, an aphrodisiac - Jacques Guerlain used to say that he made Shalimar like an outrageously low-cut dress.  Wasser’s redesign, Shalimar Initial, is simpler, lighter, a little bit fruity and even more powdery.  It’s that iris riff again.

So the big question. If we loved the originals, will we embrace these new versions too? It’s been 85 years since the first Shalimar and 40 since No.19. During that time, many of the original ingredients used have now been restricted or banned.  So no, it’s not your hormones or failing sense of smell - your old favourite fragrance is almost certainly not what it once was.  Times have changed, too - and brighter, more vibrant new ingredients have given many old classics a new lease of life.  So can your scent make you smell  younger?  It’s worth a go…

• Chanel No.19 Poudré, 50ml Eau de Parfum, £61 available nationwide from July 15^th 

• Guerlain Shalimar Initial, 40ml Eau de Parfum, £37 available nationwide from August 1^st 

Liz accepts a lift?

Things are looking up for Liz. Think she's been photoshopped, too? 

Well, slap my thighs - 52 year-old Liz Jones has gone and had a facelift.  Gone is the familiar cat butt  scowl. Mooning out from today’s Daily Wail like a hyperventilating chipmunk are her newly wide eyes and preternaturally plumped skin. All courtesy of blepharoplasty, dermaroller, Botox and fillers, not to mention the lift itself.  Hmmm.  Let me get my calculator.  So that’ll be not a lot of change from £6,000, at my purposely conservative estimate.  That’s if she paid for all of it herself.  

For while she’s grease-lightening quick to bemoan the thousands she’s wasted on anti-ageing skincare -  ‘I used to spend £400 a month on creams and facials and nothing worked’ she trills - she’s curiously schtum about the price tag on her new improved fizz. And while she’s wagging a nibbled finger at the beauty editors she accuses of colluding with big name brands in the interests of advertising, Crone would love to learn how such a life-affirming newspaper feature actually came to pass.  Has Jones selflessly laid down her own flesh for a story?

But hey, that’s what she does.  Remember, this is the woman who sacrificed her marriage in the interests of truth and integrity and now has only four-legged friends to pay attention to her isolation, poverty, anorexia... Her emotional auto-evisceration is surely a lesson to us all. 

Don’t get me wrong, Crone’s all for sharing experience - it’s precisely what she’s done for the past 40 years.  Experience has, in fact, taught her that women who ‘do’ surgery rarely look younger, just tense and miserable about their age.  Surgery’s a high-maintenance programme. Liz Jones has now embarked on a costly process of Botox and filler top-ups which in time, may prove as great a financial burden as her extreme cream habit. Because there inevitably comes a point where reality leaves the house and takes with it the sense to see when enough is enough.  And while we're talking perspective - fix one thing and the rest looks odd. Jones has already noticed how crabby her hands are compared to that baby-smooth face…

So what’s next on her agenda?  Will she, like the French performance artist Orlan, embark on more shape-shifting ops in the name of her art?  Will her surgeon, Alex Karidis stitch her up with a perpetual 'Jack Nicholson does the Joker' grin? Oh, for the love of sanity,  give us the face cream…..

 Cat got your makeup?  The way she was 

Eye of the beholder

Oh, no Dell'Olio...

Couple of items in the Daily Wail caught Crone’s eye yesterday.  And she’s not just talking Nancy Dell’Olio’s braless beauties. Right below those untrussed puppies on the very same page, was a report that suggested women become invisible at 46. This bombshell comes courtesy of Clarivu Total Vision Correction, a lens replacement technique that corrects both long and short sightedness - a pesky visual oxymoron Crone knows only too well. Their poll of  2,000 women found that by the time we reach our mid-50s, many of us say we no longer attract admiring glances from strangers or compliments from blokes.  The rot sets in somewhere towards our late 40s, when a glitch in confidence isn’t helped by having to wear specs, the report states. 

So that’s the ‘soon-to-be-50’ Dell’Olio syndrome finally explained, then. A deficit in the chutzpah department is hardly the problem. Yet were she able to focus, she’d of course agree that after a certain age, uplift should come less courtesy of 6-inch Louboutin heels and more  from strategic underwiring.  The trim waist is enviable, granted.  But clearly visible nipples drooping over your cummerbund ain’t a good look, girl.  At least she’s had the sense not to flash a crinkly cleavage - if, in fact, she has one. Her toned arms could give Michelle O’s a run for their money and approaching their half century, the pins are more lissom that Crone's were at 12.  You might call this envy - but the thigh-high hemline looks desperately naff.  In the name of elegance, just because your bits are still loved up doesn’t justify getting them out for all and sundry. Thing is, Nancy has a truly beautiful face that’s often rendered invisible by her truly blinding lack of taste. Compared to the old tousle, the short hair is a chic move - classic and fresh at the same time.  Now she’s moving in more artistic circles, Crone would like to suggest Nancy lives up to her new role as muse by embracing that good old ‘less is more’ philosophy that always leaves 'em wanting, well.....more. 

Friend of Crone watching Murray v Nadal at Wimbledon has just squeaked she’s spotted Trevor Nunn in the crowd. Let’s hope Sunday morning tennis isn’t a feature of his courtship with Nancy. They’re oddly matched in the first place, but imagining her outfit’s a call too eye-watering even for Crone. 

Staycation, fakation...

Well, it’s two days past the solstice and the sun’s still playing hard to get.  As we speak, a billowing grey mass of cumulus is obliterating the shard of great blue yonder Crone can just about spy through her window. Going, going….  If ever a break clause was needed, it’s now.  But, like the 40% of stay-at-home Brits outed in the press this week, Crone’s coffers are the driest thing about this summer’s long term forecast.  Looks like a fakation’s the only resort… 

Happily, the inconceivable has actually occurred - Crone has finally found a self-tanner she likes. Not that it comes cheap. Costing twice the price of an Easy Jet fare to the Costas but perhaps more dependable, Perricone’s No Sun Tanner’s virtually foolproof.  Just a smidgen of tan developer DHA (dihydroxyacetone) in the mix gives Crone’s beyond-the-pale limbs a subtle and convincing golden glow. The formula, designed to be built up successively (although Crone finds a single application does her nicely for three to four days) is creamy and easy to apply evenly, so streaking’s minimal if at all. Mind you, Crone doesn’t hedge her bets.  A serious buff around knees, elbows and ankles with an exfoliating Japanese wash cloth seems to avert those hideous orange stains that so characterise d-i-y do’s. And snapping on latex gloves not only looks professional, it gives a smoother finish that won’t Tango your palms. Most amazing of all though, is the lack of acrid, burnt biscuit whiff that makes so many fake tans visceral turn-offs. Okay, there’s a teensy hint of vanilla-ish something, but not enough to clash with your much-loved eau de quelque chose. 

However subtle, self-tans are strictly for bodies in Crone’s book. Faces, with their lines and wrinkles are tricky - then there’s the delicate matter of your eyes. (Sssh - but someone known to Crone tans her face  ritually, so her pores are like freckles and her skin looks seriously dingy!)  Coaxing a glow with a palette like Nars Blush Bronzer Trio is, on the other hand, a doddle. This little beauty co-ordinates best-selling shades white-gold highlighter Albatross with Laguna bronzer and thrillingly-named Orgasm blush to stunning effect. Don’t brush Laguna all over - just under your cheekbones, over your brow and along your jawline gives a sunny impression without overload. But after you’ve picked up colour with your brush, do buff it onto the back of your hand so the bristles are evenly coated. You’ll get a much lighter, subtler, easily-controlled effect on your face. Next buff Orgasm onto your cheek apples (smile if you’re not sure where they are) and without re-charging the brush, sweep it up onto your temples and browbones. Just a smidgen of Albatross highlighter swept over your cheekbones near your outer eye corners and finger-blended just under your brow arch and inner eye corners gives your whole face a lift.

The sun protection is, of course wishful thinking. But should we ever feel those hot rays again, Nivea’s Invisible SPF50 spray and handbag-sized SPF30 are simply genius blue sky thinking. Now, must mow that lawn.  Oh, pass the Pimms, do…

 Wish you were here? Close your eyes and you're on Devon's jurassic coastline... 

 • Perricone MD No Sun Tanner, £50,  0800 917 8698 and www.perriconemd.co.uk

• Nars Limited Edition Blush Bronzer Trio, £39, Liberty and www.narscosmetics.co.uk

• Nivea Sun Invisible Protection SPF50, £16.84 and Pocket Size SPF30, £5.10, Boots and Superdrug.