Sarah Vine celebrates the death of the red carpet boob job and flirts with the idea of a chin jab...
As the Hollywood awards season hurtles towards its climax - the Oscars on February 22nd - the big question in the meantime is this: Globes or SAGs?
I’m not just talking ceremonies (Golden Globes vs Screen Actors Guild) but something far more important: breasts. Are yours Globes - round, hard and shiny; or SAGs - soft, natural and subject to the law of gravity?
As far as Tinseltown is concerned, it always used to be the former. But now, it seems, the anatomy of stardom is changing - and not before time.
Even five years ago, the idea of an actress walking the red carpet bra-less without the aid of silicone was unthinkable. But, as the A-list seems so keen to prove, the unfeasibly gravity-defying orbs so often seen attached to the frontages of otherwise skeletal stars have been replaced by an unapologetically natural look.
Jennifers Aniston and Lawrence, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Roberts have been leading the silicone-free charge: the natural silhouette is in.
This is quite some breakthrough. Not just because it means fewer women will be tempted to go under the knife unnecessarily, or fill their bodies with industrial grade chemicals in the name of fashion (remember the PIP scandal?); it also levels the playing field for those of us who have never had the most buoyant of ballasts.
Like many larger-breasted women, I had perky breasts - once. For about 20 minutes, somewhere around the age of 17, they levitated miraculously in front of my ribcage. If only I’d remembered to take a picture. Soon after, they deflated like two underdone souffles, and it's been downhill ever since.
Meanwhile, BAAPS (the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons) are reporting a sharp drop in the number of breast surgeries being carried out in the UK. For once, a celebrity trend that’s all to the good.
MORE GLOSS: Sarah Vine's life changing beauty finds
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I got tremendously over-excited at the start of the week when news of a special new jab ‘to melt chin fat’ hit the papers. ATX-101 , it’s called, and it contains a purified synthetic version of deoxycholic acid - a naturally occurring molecule in the body that promotes the breakdown of dietary fat.
As one of those people who carry their fat on their neck (partly, I’m told, due to my underactive thyroid but also, I suspect, that like a lot of people these days I suffer from tech-neck), I’ve always longed for a non-invasive solution to the problem.
Currently liposuction is pretty much the only answer, but I have yet to muster the courage to try it. The idea of a jab that melts away excess fat seems too good to be true - so I decided to check it out.
It transpires that a very similar treatment already exists in the UK: Aqualux. The active ingredient is the same; the only difference is that it hasn’t been formally approved by the FDA (American Food and Drug Administration) - although it does carry a CE mark.
It’s available at my favourite London clinic, Medicetics , run by husband and wife team Geoff Mullan and Vicky Dondos. I spoke to Geoff about having the treatment myself, and he said he thought I would get very good result; there’s just one downside: swelling.
How much swelling? A LOT, apparently. Plus bruising - although it’s not painful, apparently. Looks like it's back to the facial exercises.