Your go-to guide to beauty tweakments

If you’ve made it to 60 or 70 without resorting to tweakments or surgical interventions, you might think that it’s too late to start. I mean, why bother? How much difference could they actually make?

Then, maybe, you saw the pictures of Judy Murray looking amazingly fresh-faced. Murray is 61. Her skin used to be deeply lined and spotted with pigmentation after a lifetime spent outdoors watching her sons, Andy and Jamie, play tennis.

Now, after a course of treatment with Dr Judy Todd, her face is clear, those age spots and half of the lines just, well, gone – and, good on her, she has been perfectly open about the tweakments that have made that change.

If she can get that sort of result, what might a skilled practitioner do for you? The answer: a great deal, and it’s never too late to start. A tweakment is defined as a non-surgical cosmetic procedure for which you won’t need an anaesthetic or recovery time. ‘When treating a 60-plus face, cosmetic practitioners tend to reach for dermal fillers, which will have an immediate impact,’ says Dr Joanna Christou, an advanced aesthetic doctor at The Cosmetic Skin Clinic (cosmeticskinclinic.com) whose oldest client is in her nineties.

‘But you also need to address the way the skin is losing elasticity, with skin-tightening treatments that pull the face together, hold the filler better and make it more sculpted. What you want is a bespoke result that keeps you looking like you, but natural and refreshed.’

Informative, in-depth and in the know: get the latest news, interviews and reviews with Saga Magazine.

Fillers

Best for adding structure and volume

Injectable fillers have a bad rap, but they don’t have to give you a pillow face or a trout pout. Of course they’re useful for replacing lost volume in lips and cheeks, but where they come in handy for the 60-plus face is when they’re placed deep, to redefine the jawline, lift the cheeks and conceal hollowing in the temples.

One technique Dr Christou finds useful for the 60-plus face is a touch of filler in the forehead. It restores the natural volume that gives our foreheads a slight convex curve – and it’s vital to do this before using Botox on an older face to get a more natural-looking result.

Prices for fillers start at around £400. Bear in mind that the older face may need quite a bit of product for best results.

Injectable toxins

Best for softening facial expressions

There are two things to know before you decide that injectable toxins like Botox aren’t for you. It doesn’t mean that your face will be frozen – honestly. Any decent practitioner can start you off with a minidose that will just soften the worst lines. And as well as fixing frown lines, it’s also fabulous for relaxing the muscles that pull down the corners of the mouth, or the ones that tense the neck into stringy bands.

The injections take seconds, last for several months, and cost from £150 per area.

Microneedling with radiofrequency

Best for smoothing and tightening skin

Judy Murray had three rounds of Morpheus8. It’s pretty full-on: Morpheus8 (and brands such as Secret RF, Profound RF and Intracel) delivers skin-shrinking radiofrequency deep into the skin via multiple microneedles. As the skin repairs the tiny puncture wounds from the needling and the heat damage created inside the skin by the radiofrequency energy, firmer skin emerges.

It costs £1,000-£1,500 per treatment. You’ll need three rounds for best results.

 Find more information on all these tweakments and a good practitioner at thetweakmentsguide.com/

Informative, in-depth and in the know: get the latest news, interviews and reviews with Saga Magazine.