The botox paradox

“You’ve got to love the lines,” I said to these women.

“Oh we do, we do,” they replied.

I was talking wrinkles, they meant cocaine. Which baffles me because these are people who belong to the Stoke Newington organic clique. They are lawyers, media people and music bosses who go to the gym, eat five portions of fruit and veg a day, drink green tea and buy magazines called “Men’s Health” or “Healthy Living”. They scrutinise food labelling in shops and throw down in shock any product that contains an E number or aspartame.

Yet all these grand efforts to be fit and healthy get forgotton in a dash if someone produces a tiny packet of the white stuff.

So the other night there I was at a posh gallery opening surrounded by Stokey mummies. To those who don’t know what Stokey is, it’s slang for Stoke Newington, an area of London said to be the baby capital of Europe. If you don’t own a baby in N16 then buy one quick because quite frankly you are totally out of place. The Prince and I lived there until Rosie was a year old.

Every Saturday they meet at the farmers’ market where they spend £5.00 on a bunch of stinging nettles, drink soya milk lattes and discuss Steiner schooling. And you can literally hear the gasps if a neglectful mother takes out a bottle instead of her breast to feed her baby. It’s a crowd I have little to do with now except for the odd occasion, like the gallery opening. The invite came from Lucrezia, a member of the yoga ante-natal class who’s now my best friend. It was Lucrezia who invited the Stokey mummies.

There we stood holding our glasses of wine with nothing to say. To discuss children at such an event seemed wrong. But we had nothing else in common. So after an awkward silence someone said, “Oh man I was out of my head in Barcelona. Brendan and I took two days to recover. It was wicked.” She was talking about her recent wild weekend when she and her husband “lashed it” with cocaine. That inspired someone else to share their latest drugs escapade and before I knew it they were on to botox.

What disturbed me was the way talked about it as though it was as familiar to them as making a cup of dandelion tea. These women – who think nothing of spending £25 on a bottle of organic olive oil – are content to have poisons injected into their face because they can’t face up to life. That’s how I see it and it annoys me.

“I have botox all the time, especially on my frown line,” said Sam, pointing at the area between her eyebrows.

“But you have to know HOW to botox,” she continued. “For instance, I don’t have all my crow’s feet done because otherwise my whole face would look unnatural.”

Sam loves it so much she’s just invested in a beauty franchise offering plastic surgery and botox treatments. The other girls then piped up that they too would use botox when the time comes, including real die-hard organicites – bunch of fakes. They asked Sam if they could get a discount at one of her beauty centres.

So am I the only person in the world who hates the idea of botox and plastic surgery? Virtually everyone I know thinks it’s totally normal and fine to be injecting poisons into their skin every six months. Yet by doing this they are shoring up the attitude that women must forever look young, while men with wrinkles can continue to enjoy the advantages of looking "distinguished".

One of my friends has it on her forehead, another in the lines next to her nose. The Prince wants botox in his armpits like Tony Blair because he has problem perspiration. But what is that doing to your armpits, clogging up the sweat glands like that?

I think in about 30 years time there’ll be one little old lady left in a world of plastic faces and that will be me.