2023: My Year In Tweakments, Part 1

Good grief, I tried a lot of tweakments this year! Here’s part one of the full run-down, with links to videos and posts to show you more details of all the procedures I’m talking about – from the big one-off ones to the smaller, regular ones, and everything in between. This post was turning into such a lengthy saga that I’m putting it up in two parts. This is January to June, 2023. 

January:  The Treatment with Keren Bartov

It was a huge thrill to be invited in to meet London’s latest super-facialist, the brilliant Keren Bartov who treats her stellar clientele to a mixture of fabulous, hands-on work backed up by a quick bit of zapping with some of the many high-tech devices she keeps at the ready.

I had a bit of radiofrequency, a touch of IPL, I think some ultrasound too, and emerged with my skin firmer and glowing. No wonder stars from Rita Ora and Demi Moore to Naomie Harris and Carey Mulligan are queuing up to see her.

From £400-700, Keren Bartov, 25 Kensington Park Road, London W11, book here

March: Scalp health analysis

Over to the Philip Kingsley clinic in Mayfair – where Kingsley, a trichologist to the stars, grew his own legend by tending the tresses of the famous including Audrey Hepburn. I popped in to see trichologist Susie Hammond because my scalp felt inflamed and wanted her expert analysis on what it was and what I should do about it.

Susie examined my head with her microscope and pronounced that what I needed was coal-tar shampoo and other treatment products to calm down my itchy scalp and exfoliate the scuffy bits. She is more usually consulting for people with hair loss, and advising them how to support normal hair growth with gentle consistent care and appropriate products.

Results: six weeks later, my scalp is still a bit more pink than Susie would like, but it no longer feels irritable and itchy, which is a huge relief.

Hair consultation, from £200 online, more information here

March: Rediscovering LPG endermologie

Twenty years ago, I knew endermologie as a mechanical massage for cellulite, so I was amazed to find that it has evolved into a hugely effective treatment for lymph-drainage and skin stimulation as well as pre-and-post tweakment support. The body treatment head is like a mechanical hand with inbuilt suction, and the subtlety of touch to be able to carry out both light lymphatic drainage and deep-tissue, fascia-releasing massage, from the soles of your feet to your scalp. On the face, the smaller treatment head softly pinches up and releases skin tissues (again with the suction and stimulation).

Surgeons love it for pre-and post face lifts and lipo; aesthetic practitioners love it because it both prepares the skin for energy-based tweakments like RF needling and improves healing and enhances the results; and I love it as a tension-busting massage that also shifts water-retention from my hips and thighs in the space of an hour. Take a look at the video, I highly recommend it.

From £60 for the face and £90 for the body endermologie.com

March: HArmonyCa ‘Hybrid’ Filler

HArmonyCa is the new ‘hybrid’ injectable from Allergan which combines a hyaluronic acid gel (like a normal HA filler) with calcium hydroxyapatite, a substance that is known to stimulate your skin tissues into producing more of their own collagen, but slowly, over the next few months – a ‘grown-your-own filler’, if you like. I had a treatment with Dr Sophie Shotter late in 2022 to address the hollowness that I am getting in my cheeks as I age (there is a video but it hasn’t been ok’d for release yet).

Why this rather than ‘normal’ filler? Because rather than the sort of ‘structured’ volume that normal HA fillers use to contour and define the face, HArmonyCa provides more of a ‘soft’ volume to boost the dwindling fat pads in the ‘lateral face’, the bit that goes hollow if you suck your cheeks in, or where you’d put a slab of low-lying 80s-style blusher. It is injected with a cannula to spread the product smoothly across the treated area. Thanks to the way the product works, I could see an immediate improvement in the hollowing (in the photo below taken halfway through treatment, you can see the softening in my left cheek – on the right in the photo – compared to the untreated side) and over the next four months it kind of settled in as the calcium hydroxyapatite took over and my skin looked less crepey too (it’s good for those vertical ‘accordion lines’ on the lower cheeks).

This appointment was for an assessment and top-up – because Dr Shotter always prefers to under-treat, and after four months we both reckoned there were a couple of areas, towards the sides of my cheeks, that would benefit from a spot more.

Also, I know I’m always advising that you don’t go and be a guinea pig for a new treatment until it’s established, but Dr Shotter had already been using HAmonyCa for a year by the time I saw her and I’d seen some of the people who’d tried it and they looked great, so…

HArmonyCa with Dr Sophie Shotter, from £650, depending on the amount used.

April – P3  – aka ‘Photoshop for the Skin’

No, ‘P3’ doesn’t give you much of a clue what this is, but if I call it ‘photoshop for the skin,’ I bet you’d want to know more. For P3, the creative and idiosyncratic Dr Sach Mohan has put together a quick, easy-to-tolerate treatment with three components. First is the Pico Genesis laser (which suits all skin tones, doesn’t need numbing and hurts no more than, as he put it, ‘a shower of monsoon rain’.

It felt a bit more prickly and less poetic than that to me, but perfectly bearable, then he injected a mixture of PRP (the second P, that’s platelet-rich-plasma taken from my blood at the start of the treatment) and Profhilo (the third) around my hairline and stood back to wait for my reaction… which was astonishment as I could feel the stuff trickling down the inside of my face and fizzing as it settled into the four million tiny ‘vacuoles’ created in my skin…

Results: Take a look at the video here for more detail and to see the results.

From £950 (there are P4 and P5 involving peptides and polynucelotides…)

April: Emsculpt Neo Edge for Abs

I love a bit of Emsculpt. This is the treatment that gives you the equivalent of 20,000 crunches, or squats, in a half-hour session thanks to high-intensity focused electromagnetic energy that makes muscles contract in ways, and at speeds, that we could never manage on our own at the gym. Doing crunches, for instance, we can make our muscles work at something like 40% of their full capacity. Emsculpt can push that up to 100%.   Dr Preema Vig called me in to try the new Edge applicator and, yep, I can confirm that it’s like side-planks on steroids, but very tolerable because her lovely nurses start me off gently and sneak the intensity up during the half-hour treatment. They kindly tell me that if you exercise a lot and your muscles are in good shape, yes, you will feel it more. Four sessions later, my obliques (and the rest of my abs) feel like titanium, even though Dr Preema says I won’t have the full results til September. The Neo is the version of Emsculpt that adds radiofrequency into the equation, to melt fat under the skin while sculpting muscles, but apparently I didn’t have enough fat on my obliques to zap, so just had the RF in skin-boosting mode. You might think that this treatment was better for people who need to wake up idle, unused muscles – and it’s great for that – but I find it supercharges my muscles and moves them onto a new level, and makes planks and balancing poses in yoga miles easier.

Results-wise: I don’t have pictures from September because of course I forgot to go back for them, but already by June, my obliques were looking in excellent shape though I say it myself – here’s a pic above. It’s not a direct comparison, but it will give you an idea.

Emsculpt Neo, with Dr Preema Vig, from £500 per session

April: Armpit Toxin for a sweat-free summer

I know it sounds mad, but having tiny, superficial injections of toxin in my armpits is one of my favourite treatments. It’s quick, relatively comfortable (!) and after a week, the toxin blocks the messages from the nerves that are telling the sweat glands to sweat, so, for the next eight months, my armpits will be dry and relatively fragrant.

It’s also a quick treatment, Dr Sophie Shotter is a dab hand with her needles and whips round each armpit in about five minutes, the needle marks vanish in a few days.

Results: those tiny blebs vanish in a couple of days, and after that, summer is no sweat.

Armpit toxin, from £500, Dr Sophie Shotter

 

May: Emsella chair for my pelvic floor

The Emsella chair is another favourite from BTL Aesthetics’ clinically-proven muscle-toning technologies. In a nutshell, it drives high-intensity muscle-contracting energy into your pelvic floor, that hammock of muscle that hangs between your pubic bone at the front and your tailbone at the back, to tone it up. Why tone it up? Because the pelvic floor is notorious for becoming weaker with age, or after childbirth, or both, and that leads to stress incontinence which women just don’t talk about and seem to think is ‘just one of those things’. If you’re not good at doing regular Kegel exercises (guilty), this gives you the equivalent of 11,000 kegels in one half-hour session. My pelvic floor is ok – laughing or sneezing don’t bring on leaks – but skipping on a full bladder is a major challenge, and I wake up several times a night to pee.

Results: After six sessions at the Dr Medispa clinic, I can do 50 skips no problem, which is a major result, but I still wake up a couple of times in the night. I think that problem may be more in my head than my bladder.

Emsella chair, £1,530 for six sessions, at Dr Medispa 

 

May: Augustinus Bader facial with Lord Gavin

Off to the Lanserhof at the Arts Club in Dover Street to catch up with the fabulous Lord Gavin McLeod-Valentine who is usually flying around the world prepping celebs (Sharon Stone, Halle Berry) for photoshoots and red-carpet events.

I know Gavin is brilliant, I’ve had facials with him before, but his work has stepped up into the superleague in the past few years and the whole experience – from the sculpting massage, the barrage of high-tech machines and a lot of face-slapping for skin stimulation – was sensational as were the results. I’d swear I never had cheekbones like this before. Luckily I caught lots of it on video so you can get an idea of it, and hear me interview Gavin about his extraordinary work.

Baderglow rejuvenating facial, £475, bookings here. Lord Gavin is only available by appointment.

May: Slimyonik Air BodyStyler

With a name like that, who wouldn’t want to try it? The Slimyonik Air Bodystyler is for body contouring and lymph drainage, and it’s styled as an inflating pair of trousers that deploy compression therapy, starting at the ankles, and creeping up your legs to your ribs.

What can it do? Gently stimulate the flow of lymph, which improves metabolism, supports gut health and, if you do a series of treatments, reduces the appearance of cellulite. I enjoyed a relaxing half hour lying in the suit with a device across my face that delivered oxygen-enriched air straight into my nostrils, which I am told helps with the general detoxification of my body tissues.

Results: even in just one session, the nice firm pressure of the compression suit shifted all the fluid that I tend to retain around my hips and thighs, though I understand that the benefits are cumulative, and you need a course of sessions to really see what it can do.

From £75 per session. For more information and a clinic-finder, click here.

June: NeoGen Plasma Skin Resurfacing

Up to Leeds to see Dr Raj Thethi at The Yorkshire Skin Clinic for  NeoGen Plasma, which uses pure nitrogen plasma to revamp your collagen and resurface your skin from the inside out.  Full details and video on this post here. It was hardcore, because rather than have a series of low-intensity treatments (that’s what worked wonders for Shirley Ballas, see photos below), I’d opted to have the all-in-one-go, high-intensity version, which meant more discomfort during treatment and then a week of downtime while all the treated skin peeled off. Yup.

If you follow my Instagram Stories, you may have seen that recovery was quite a journey (swelling, bruising, weeping skin, you were all horrified, but I knew this was what it would be like and it didn’t hurt, but it didn’t look great and scared everyone who saw me). A week later, I was out filming as usual and six weeks later, the Visia machine was amazed by the results (well, it noted that my pigmentation was greatly reduced, my skin texture was much improved, and my pores had all but vanished).

There are some great before and after pics to come that show how much it tightened up my skin, especially on the lower face, but a newspaper has been sitting on them along with the accompanying article for five months, and I can’t publish them until they do.

If you’re thinking of trying the treatment, I’d strongly suggest you opt for a series of low-intensity treatments where there’s minimal downtime, but you’ll get the same results, just more slowly.

NeoGen Plasma, from £1,200. With Dr Raj Thethi, £3,000

Part Two – July to December 2023, coming very soon