Hype In A Jar

Posted Apr 12, 2007 by Sandy Hughes

Updated Apr 12, 2007 at 12:54 PM

Ah, Spring.  The time of year when a (not so) young girl’s thoughts turn to Botox and Restylane…or, at the very least, a nice little facial peel.
Yes, as our calendars fill up with those big events that typically fall in the middle of the year—weddings, graduations, class reunions, anniversaries, birthdays (well, for some of you, anyway—we don’t have birthdays anymore unless there’s a good chance there’s expensive jewelry involved), even the dewiest among us will, at some point, look in the mirror and do the face-pull.  Or we’ll at least manage to find some frown lines or eye bags that we’d rather be without, and we wonder, with all the cosmetics and cosmetic procedures available today, just how far we should go to in the pursuit of perfection.
Actually, perfection is the wrong word.  Most of us just want to look our best for as long as we can, and, with all of the new products and procedures out there, why shouldn’t we try? 

Dear Reader, there are many who will lie to you about this, but not us.  The cold, hard truth is this: When it comes to the elimination of the signs of aging, it’s pretty much the knife or the needle, baby.  Forget about all those celebrity-endorsed creams and pills, the Park Avenue dermatologists’s product lines, the pseudo-scientific “medical breakthroughs”  that the cosmetics conglomerates roll out as often as their new lipstick shades, and any cream that claims to be “Better Than Botox” .
The dirty little secret among the Beautiful People is that those things are as much a sucker’s game as diet pills and get-rich-in-real-estate books.  Of course, not many people will tell you this for the simple reason that there is just far, far too much money to be made by duping you into paying $150 for a jar of tarted-up Crisco, and the cosmetics companies are more than willing to share the wealth to keep everyone on board.  Most magazine and TV editors aren’t about to bite the advertising hands that feed them by telling you the whole story, (and, hey, for enough free samples, we’d probably shut up, too), but publications that don’t, as our Aunt Idella would say, “have a dog in that fight”, like Consumer Reports, will give you the straight scoop.  The fact is, at least right now, anyone who claims to know about a non-surgical, non-prescription wrinkle cure is either misinformed, or selling something.  (Was anyone really surprised when Cindy Crawford admitted that she’d been undergoing plastic surgery for the last ten years?)

Not that there aren’t a couple of effective, skin-improving ingredients out there.  There certainly are, namely tretonion (Retin-A, Renova, etc.) and glycolic acids that can speed up the turnover and exfoliation of dead skin cells (which slows as we age, like everything else).  And any moisturizer, whether it’s Vaseline, Crisco, or La Prarie Cellular at $335 per ounce, is going to temporarily smooth your skin.  But beyond that, even some of the promising new ingredients like antioxidants and copper peptides are still just that:  promising, but not proven. 

So while plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures like Botox and Restylane may initially be more expensive than a high-end wrinkle cream (although not by much), in the long run, they’re going to give you your biggest bang-for-your beauty- bucks.
That being said, how do you decide where to start, and, more importantly, when to stop?

We’ll tell you what the insiders know next time, but until then, don’t waste another penny on the hype—save it for the serious stuff.