DAILY MAIL – September 2023 – SARAH VINE

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But the truth is time marches on and, earlier this year, I noticed that things were starting to head inexorably south once more. I didn’t want to have another thread lift: just too painful. Yes, I feel bad enough about my neck, but not bad enough to go through that again. So I decided to go a different route: injectables.

Injectables have had a bit of a bad rap of late. Not just the over-use of Botox, resulting in frozen expressions and so-called ‘bowling-ball’ foreheads; but also poorly administered fillers, resulting in that awful pillow face you see on so many celebrities.

But I had heard about one woman with the lightest of touches and the tiniest, thinnest of needles who had developed a technique using a combination of micro fillers, tiny, individual threads and Botox to treat the neck and jowls. I decided to take the plunge.

Dr Ivy Igerc is of Croatian and Italian extraction, slim, impeccably dressed and impossibly glamorous with 20 years’ experience in the business. When not tending to her client list of bashful celebrities and supermodels, she is to be found lecturing on the latest techniques in aesthetic enhancement all over the world...

She works out of the Hale Clinic (haleclinic.com) in London. But when we meet she has just returned from China, and is full of excitement and energy about some of the new technology emanating from that part of the world. She’s also fascinated by the differences in beauty standards between cultures — did you know, for example, that in China having ears that stick out from your face is considered highly desirable?

She laughs: ‘Over here, everyone wants their ears pinned back; there, it’s the opposite.’

But Dr Ivy is nothing if not inventive. She uses tiny amounts of filler to reposition the ears — a technique not dissimilar to that used in non-surgical rhinoplasties, where the nose is reshaped using the cleverest of optical illusions.

In fact, most of what Dr Ivy does is about tricking the eye into thinking what it’s seeing is not, as, in my case, a slightly weary-looking divorcee who honestly can’t remember the last time she had a facial and whose skincare regime consists of shoving on whatever cream happens to be lying around the bathroom, but a sophisticated, well-preserved woman of indeterminate middle years.

One of the most striking things is her technique. Most practitioners will have you lying back on a bed. Not Dr Ivy. After sterilising the skin with something that smells like swimming pools and applying numbing cream to the face, she has you standing up, hair back, against a white backdrop.

You are instructed to in turn frown, smile, raise your eyebrows, let your jaw go slack while she marks out the areas to be treated with a surgical pencil.

Using the finest of needles, she then injects quickly and confidently, stepping back every few punctures to observe the effects, rather like an artist applying paint to a canvas.

It’s a bit like being attacked by a small but determined swarm of little bees, only one must resist the urge to run away. When you think about it, the standing up thing makes perfect sense. When I lie down, all the jowls and wrinkles obligingly slide around the side of my face. If Dr Ivy can’t see the full horror, how on earth is she supposed to treat it?

After Botox in the vertical frown lines between my eyes — not to erase them, just to soften them slightly, I get little nips of the stuff in my crow’s feet, and then she asks me to clench my jaw.

Here she goes in slightly deeper, to turn off the powerful masseter muscle and stop me a) grinding my teeth and b) reduce the volume of muscle for a slimmer silhouette.

Lastly, she injects those big vertical muscles in the neck which are responsible for pulling the mouth and jaw down over time. Then it’s time for the filler. And this is where the magic really happens. Using tiny jabs of filler, she widens my cheekbones almost imperceptibly just beneath my temples. Again, this is all part of the illusion: emphasise the cheekbones and you detract from the lower part of the face.

Then she goes in on the jawline, injecting microscopic doses of filler underneath the muscle in order to lift and support it — rather like scaffolding holding up a sagging roof — to create definition.

A final bit of filler to soften the dreaded marionette lines at the corners of my mouth, and it’s time for the mini threads, just that little bit of extra support beneath the skin (these, by the way, don’t hurt at all). The whole thing has taken probably no more than three minutes. It costs from £800. But the effect is unmistakable.

The Botox takes a few days to kick in; but the fillers and the mini threads do their work instantly. And there it is: my jawline. Hello, old friend.

Over the course of the next few weeks, as the Botox in my neck and masseter starts to work, the results get even better. And it’s exactly what I had hoped for: not so drastic I look like someone’s taped my chin around the back of my neck, but noticeable enough (to me, anyway) to give me a new-found confidence.

It will need maintenance, of course. Ephron was right: the only truly permanent solution is a surgical lift. But I really don’t want that.

More to the point, I don’t need it. I am not a supermodel or an actress, no one really cares what I look like.

No one except me, that is. Now I am happy to say that, when I look in the mirror these days, I feel quite good about my neck. And, at 56, that’s not bad going at all.