Plastic fantastic
Sarah Sands
Botox is so commonplace now that you would think a six-year-old child could administer it. According to the Parisian cosmetic surgeon, Doctor Nelly GauthierHazan, who is known in France as the botox queen of Europe, this is the problem.
There is an art to botox which has been lost by pumping it into the face like polyfiller. Being French, Dr Gauthier lays the blame with Americans. ‘Everything is too much, there is no subtlety, you have got to tone it down.’ The effect of recklessly applied botox is visible. Dr Gauthier shows me photographs of films stars such as Nicole Kidman and tells me to ‘watch the eyebrows’. If they turn into Dr Spock as they lift them, there is the evidence. Dr Gauthier’s doses of botulinum toxin are far softer. They allow expression and movement. She regards her needle as her art.
Her greatest attraction is her reputation for turning clients down. Legendary French actresses have begged her to work on their faces but she is severe in her judgments. ‘It can be an addiction; I tell people to stop.’ A European designer reputedly asked for treatment and Dr Gauthier replied haughtily, ‘I will not put my signature to that face.’ She is most withering about the American-style facelift. ‘You can see the skeleton. It is like looking at death.’ Dr Gauthier says that her business is not eliminating wrinkles but searching for ‘allure’ and ‘charm’ in a face. Her surroundings are avowedly unclinical. Her street in Paris is awash with cosmetic surgeons. I wander into two offices by mistake. Both are bare and white, with a cluster of Nigerian clients waiting glumly in reception. Nelly Gauthier operates within a courtyard behind great oak doors. Her rooms are ambassadorial — high ceilings, expensive furniture, extravagant arrangements of flowers. She peers coquettishly from her office door. At 49, she is tall and striking, with shades of Isabelle Adjani and the French model Inés de la Fressange. Her hair is bobbed and she is wearing cream cashmere and manly trousers.
Later she produces some photographs of herself before she was 20. She looks pretty but unremarkable. ‘I am better now,’ she says, too dispassionate to sound vain. ‘I was unformed then, I didn’t know what suited me.’ This is her main cultural objection to the American standard of beauty. It is based on a teenage model. Nelly Gauthier, as a Parisian, demands a celebration of ‘mature beauty’. She points out that most women now live to 80, so they can no longer be written off at 40. ‘You need to stay looking good.’ Dr Gauthier is the daughter of two fashion illustrators, who dressed her in blue as a baby because it suited her better than pink. She grew up with the mantra that you must find what suits you and not try to emulate others. If you want to be ordered straight out of her surgery, you could try saying that you would like the face of, for instance, Marilyn Monroe.
At school, Dr Gauthier’s talent was for geometry and still her great pleasure is to find the centre of a face. She trained as a doctor and then a surgeon working on faces that had suffered traumatic injury or disease.
‘I was too emotional for this, I got too involved, so I became a cosmetic surgeon,’ she explains, with the hooded, dissatisfied gaze of an artist. I somehow expect her to reach over her desk and rearrange my nose if I do not keep her talking.
What makes her botox skills particular is her study of light and perspective on faces. She shows me some photographs of famous old Hollywood stars, such as Jean Harlow and Judy Garland. Their luminous beauty was due to a pinpoint of light on their foreheads from the camera. ‘The key of light,’ murmurs Dr Gauthier. The secret is that the light shone slightly differently on each person, for the purposes of maximum illumination.
Dr Gauthier claims to be able to locate the triangle between brows and forehead which makes botox convey almost magical qualities. If you get it right, the eyes look wider and brighter, the brows are perfect mounds. If it is wrong, you can lower the position of the eyes, turn brows into alien lines and rob the face of expression. The idea of needles being waved around at botox parties makes Dr Gauthier shudder.
Botox can improve almost all women, giving them a fresh and rested look, according to Gauthier. It is certainly the answer to wrinkles and the erosion of age. What it cannot repair is excess skin. ‘That, you have to cut,’ says Gauthier sternly. ‘Botox and fillers won’t help you.’ ‘It is like your skirt being too long. You can either put on weight to make it shorter — and look like a sack of potatoes. Or you cut the hem.’ Even Gauthier’s facelifts are more subtle than the American kind, she claims. ‘You do not want to look cadaverous.’ Ideally, the ‘work’ needs to be small and constant — perpetual repairs and maintenance. The American whom Dr Gauthier salutes is Demi Moore. Perhaps because she has never tried to look like somebody else, just an improved version of herself. On the other hand, most of us would be pretty pleased to start out as Demi Moore. Dr Gauthier’s other female role models for ‘looking good’ are Sharon Stone and Madonna.
The Frenchwoman whom she is merciless towards is Brigitte Bardot. The film star’s refusal to undertake any surgery is regarded as a sign of conceit rather than lack of vanity. ‘She was too pretty when she was young,’ sighs Dr Gauthier. ‘So she thinks that she does not have to do anything now. Well, I would rather look at Joan Collins than at Brigitte Bardot.’ Dr Gauthier’s message to the over-forties is that they should take pride in their appearance rather than pine for the face of a 20-year-old. It is not youth that counts but ‘charm’ and ‘allure’, and these qualities can be displayed at any age. Then she shakes her cute haircut and looks at me down her aquiline nose. ‘Actually, I am 50, but only just. Could you say in your article that I am 49?’ Even the mistress of allure, the queen of botox, has some feminine frailties.
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