Elle UK - 09.2019

237

ELLEBeauty

237

Jenny was 28 years old the first timeshe had Botox. She lay,

head back, in an unfamiliar room while the botulinum toxin

was injected between the tiny lines that ran like train tracks

between her eyebrows. She wasn’t sure she looked younger

exactly, but it left her with a brow as smooth as gossamer

and inspired a clutch of compliments from friends and

colleagues. When other little rivulets started to make their

way across the landscape of her face, she reclined in her

doctor’s chair and submitted the signs of age to the needle

prick of Botox once more. And so it went on... again and again

and again. ‘By the time I was 38, I was having Botox five times

a year, across my whole upper face,’ she says. ‘One day

I looked in the mirror and realised that my face had two ages.‘

And so Jenny, like many other women, did what she

never thought she would: she turned her back on the medical

procedures that had been a part of her life for over 14 years.

Where once ice-skating-rink smoothness and big, juicy

features were the aesthetic goal, now true beauty comes in

the form of a face that wears the patina of age with elegance

and pride. ‘Finally, at 42, I want to look natural,’ she says.

Wrinkles are the new vogue. That’s certainly the case if

one looks across the fashion tundra, where real, aged faces

• all delicate lines and skin peppered with sun spots – peer
  back at us. This season’s catwalks were filled not with faces
  flushed and plumped by the bellows of youth, but those gently
  weathered and artfully moulded by decades of experience.
  Fortysomething supermodels of yesteryear Amber Valletta,
  Shalom Harlow and Stella Tennant and 5O-year-old Helena
  Christensen all now front major fashion campaigns, while
  a bare-faced Lauren Hutton has never looked as beautiful
  as she did walking the Valentino autumn/winter 2O19
  Couture runway in Paris. A 54 -year-old Keanu Reeves made
  the world gasp in lascivious unison when he emerged

WORDS by JENNIFER GEORGE

THE VOGUE for INFL ATED, L INE - FREE,

TUMESCENT- L IPPED FACES is OVER.

N O W, the V ERY WOME N who PAID TO LOOK

IDENTICALLY AGEL ESS are PAYING TO RECL AIM

the INDIV IDUAL FACES they L EF T BE HIND...

Th e RISE

OF the

BESP OKE

FACE

PHOTOGR APH by BETH STERNBAUM