Earlobes. Do you ever find yourself surreptitiously checking other peoples' out? No, me neither, until last year. Now I find myself honing in on them in a most unseemly way. For comparison’s sake, I mean. When did mine get so baggy? Who knew they could look so…old.
Check out the lobes of your 14-year-old daughter as opposed to your own, or have a look at a picture of yourself where they are on show from ten or 20 years ago and you’ll see. Our earlobes, after all, age just like the rest of us (why wouldn’t they?) and when I think of all the sun mine have been exposed to throughout their little lives, how I have so neglected them on the skincare front and generally treated them with such a lack of care and respect no wonder they suddenly…went to pot. Not only are they crisscrossed with lines and papery to the touch, but they sag. Meanwhile, because of all the dangly earrings I’ve worn since I had them pierced in Selfridges in 1974, my, er, holes are massive.
Cocktail-sausage-down-Oxford-Street massive, I’m talking here. No more tiny little diamond studs for me, then. They’ve got to be grape-sized, almost, in order not to go right through.
Oh dear, yet another body part to have a hang-up about, for the cosmetic industry to exploit. “Leave my lobes alone!” I hear you cry. But because they have become such a canvas for the multiple piercings us women of a certain postcode and age all seem to have, I cannot. Their aesthetic relevance, in my opinion, is in direct inverse proportion to our cleavage and knees as we age. By that I mean, as the surface area of skin we are willing to expose shrinks, ear lobes present themselves as a last bastion, the one locus of self-expression where, along with your fingernails maybe, you don’t have to “dress appropriately”. As such we need to tend them just like any other exposed body part. Did you know, by the way, that as we get older age our ears, like our noses, continue to grow?
The least drastic solution to my lobe issues are 'push-up bras' you can buy for your earlobes - plastic backings that artificially hike the skin up so that the piercing holes don’t look stretched ( Earlite sells 60 patches for £5.49). The most drastic is to get a lobuloplasty - a procedure which involves having two triangular chunks taken out of you the flappiest part of your lobes and then sewn back together under a local anaesthetic. It costs around £900 and is all the rage in Beverly Hills. If you are a fan of Keeping Up With The Kardashians you will have watched Kris Jenner having it done. For those of us a bit squeamish about the knife, though (i.e, me) there’s a slightly less invasive alternative.
Luckily it is offered in London by Dr Suha Kersh , IMHO the best cosmetic doctor in the city and possibly the whole of the UK. Yup, my lobes could definitely do with some rejuvenation, she says as she peers at them through her magnifying glass. I’m not the only one seeking an earlobe makeover either, as Dr Kersh confirms:
“These treatments are becoming increasingly popular among middle-aged women in particular. Normally they’re concerned about volume loss and dehydrated skin with a degree of laxity. This laxity of the ear lobe means that earrings no longer sit comfortably in the earring hole of the ear.