Going South: Regular peels

I’m a great one for doing anything once. As a child/teen I was always the first to volunteer for almost any experience. Squashing baked beans up your nose? Me! Picking up a real snake and wearing it as a bracelet? Me! Running through a field of stinging nettles just in your pants? Me! Double piercing your ears using a needle and a bar of soap? Me! Eating endless Body Shop products to see if they did taste of peppermint and not just foot lotion? Me! It was just getting me to do anything more than once that was the problem.

Even in adulthood, I notice my house is full of stuff that I have tried and discarded. Great plans and ideas that I have never quite followed through with. There are hundreds of intriguing books, I’ve half read. Wrapped presents I never gave. There’s even a fencing mask from a course I never completed.

And the same could be said for my journey through the world of beauty. Squeeze your gut fat into bright pink frozen bar?  Me! Have a munching crunching caterpillar thing eat your face? Me! Put a hosepipe where the sun don’t shine? Me! Me! Me! They were all, I have to say, excellent treatments. But the things you are supposed to do regularly, the things that make a difference, like taking your make-up off at night, those sort of the things, like having regular manicures, I am quite bad at.

It’s called maintenance, I know, and I’ll fess up now. I am a low maintenance kind of a girl. Not the sort of confession that goes down well in a forum such as this. I know the old SV  who runs this site quite often despairs and she is not backward in coming forward when it comes to vocalising her disapproval. “You need a good haircut,” she’ll say even before I have managed to take my coat off. “Christ your feet!” she’ll exclaim when I am trying to show her my new pink furry clogs (trust me: they are a good look!).

So in an attempt to be more glamorous, more high maintenance, more Gloss: I am having a course (you see, more than one) of glycolic peels at the Harley Street Skin Clinic . The idea is that you have a gentle peel of 30-40% and you do it once a week for six weeks and then continue to do a top-up once a month. The little and often theory helps stimulate the collagen in the skin and rids it of that tired dull-looking City-Face forever.

The treatment is quick, Lesley the therapist is charming and good fun to talk to, the salon has more teas, coffees and delicious biscuits than a luxury cup-cake shop and there is no down time at all. You’re in, out, peeled and baby-butt perfect almost in the same time it takes you to chow down a lunchtime chicken wrap.

I have had three so far and I have to say there is a visible difference. I have got that well-maintained glossy glow that I normally only ever see in ladies' magazines. My skin looks like I sleep in an oxygen tent and only bath in Evian. I am regularly greeted with ‘you look well’ compliments which baring in mind how much wine I drink, how many fags I puff and how few hours I manage to sleep (I have an insomniac 3-year old), has to be something of a God damn miracle.

I am booked in for another three and I shall definitely make sure that I absolutely will go. Finally, at the age of 103, I have turned over a new leaf! I WILL become more high maintenance, I am determined to make the effort. To get a tiny bit of Gloss… at last.