Why feel bad about facelifts?

Why, I wonder, did Lady Archer want to keep her facelift a secret? Lumbered with a seriously dodgy husband and a secretary who was willing to betray confidences, it would hardly be surprising if she had her fair share of wrinkles and grey hairs. Yet she looked elegant before the facelift - she was once famously described as 'fragrant' by the judge in her husband's libel case - and now, after a little surgical assistance, she looks terrific.

Strong-willed and intelligent as she is, I only wish that she had come clean about her operation and had the courage to stand up and say: 'Look what I've chosen to spend my own money on to make myself feel good! And don't I look wonderful?' Because she does.

But instead, like so many before her, Lady Archer went out of her way to hide the fact that she'd submitted to the surgeon's knife, winning her case for 'distress, anxiety and embarrassment' in the High Court after her former personal assistant allegedly leaked the information.

Lady Archer's decision to go ahead with the case throws an intriguing light on society's hypocritical attitude to appearance.

For while we live in an imageobsessed society, in which we are besieged with airbrushed images of 'perfect' models and actresses, there is still a definite stigma attached to those ordinary women who are willing to try the most drastic means to improve their appearance.

Designer clothes, manicured nails, a glowing tan (whether real or from a bottle), coiffeured hair - all these expenses are celebrated as part of a woman's armoury in holding back the march of time.

But cosmetic surgery is different. It is as if choosing to spend large sums of money and endure pain to improve your looks indicates weakness and a level of vanity which is somehow unacceptable.

This, to my mind, cannot be right. Let me come clean. Three years ago, I went to a well-known Harley Street plastic surgeon to have shots of a substance called Artecoll in my smile lines as part of a newspaper article on vanity.

This mixture of collagen and acrylate plumps out the wrinkles, for a while at least.

While it made little discernible difference to my appearance, I enjoyed the experience - and a year later I had Botox injected into my frown lines for another article.

Since then, I haven't bothered with any such treatments, and wouldn't consider a facelift, simply because my family would think it both unnecessary and extravagant.

But I have no problem with women who do. I once saw the notorious Cindy Jackson, whose numerous cosmetic enhancements have made her an extraordinary testimony to the plastic surgeon's art, being attacked on TV by a famous woman writer.

To my surprise, I found myself on Jackson's side - partly because I didn't like the puritanical, censorious tone of the woman who harangued her and partly because Jackson has never tried to conceal the procedures she has undergone to achieve her looks.

For whatever one's own vanities are, I do think it's important to be honest about the artifice.

When a close friend the same age as me, whose hair is streaked with white, once asked me why I colour mine, and suggested that we should 'grow old gracefully', my response was an expletive.

I don't want to grow old gracefully, I want to struggle most of the way - and I don't mind who knows it.

Yes, I tint my hair, and yes, I wear lots of make-up. If this is base vanity then I plead guilty to the charge.

Militant feminists and quietly sensible women have always eschewed all interest in personal appearance. But the rest of us, if we are being honest, find it hard to break free of the binding chains of beauty.

We swop the names of face creams which promise 'recover' and 'renewal' in a wistful vocabulary of longing. The names say it all: 'Visible Difference', 'Intense Lift', 'First Defence' - you know the kind of thing.

Agreeing that we would never resort to actual plastic surgery, we confess that, in private, we tweak our sagging cheeks in the mirror and think, 'If only . . .'

So why the lingering guilt? Far from being an admission of weakness, being honest about your vanities can also be an assertion of strength.

Years ago, sitting by my daughter's bedside in London's Great Ormond Street Hospital, exhausted and sick with worry as she underwent treatment for bowel disease, I took out my cosmetic bag and began to apply make-up.

Suddenly, my eyes met those of a much younger mother across the ward, doing the same thing. We smiled in mutual recognition.

Was this a passive pandering to male-imposed stereotypes? Was it two weak-willed women fussing about their appearance while there was genuine pain around us? No, it was not. Our war paint said: 'We won't go under!'

The mask was applied as a gesture of defiance against the suffering all round us, against the aching vulnerability of human flesh which made our own children so ill.

Nor is this a new phenomenon - the result of a televisual age in which appearance is everything. Women have always been conditioned to think their appearance will dictate success or failure.

Cleopatra was clever, but it is her fatal beauty we remember. From the evidence of ancient burial sites, men were sent to the after-life accompanied by useful weapons; women, on the other hand, were dispatched with containers for cosmetics and polished mirrors.

In Darwinian terms, vanity was not merely a matter of a woman's personal choice, it was her means of survival. And the message that men did not need to be goodlooking to be successful, but women did, has been passed down through the centuries.

But today, we live in a world of contradictions. On the one hand, women are more empowered and independent than ever; yet on the other, we are more in thrall to the business of beauty than at any stage in history.

On the day I had my Artecoll injections in Harley Street, I was disturbed to witness women in the waiting room who were in their early 30s. Most looked fabulous as they were, with no need for cosmetic enhancement.

Not naturally judgmental, I couldn't help feeling that they should be playing with their children, or concentrating on getting to the top of their profession, or white-water rafting - anything other than queueing up to undergo nose or boob jobs in the hope that it would somehow enhance their lives.

What bothered me most was the fact that many of these women had been encouraged to visit the surgeon by their husbands or boyfriends. What kind of relationship can be based on such a shallow, skin-deep valuation of the self?

For whatever tricks or techniques women use to enhance their appearance, we can never alter the fact that, minute by minute, we are all dying.

In parish churches and cathedrals all over this land you will find carved skulls on old tombs which chatter their hollow chorus against vanity.

They say: 'Fine lady, you may powder and paint all you like, but soon you too will come to this.'

Spend thousands of pounds on beauty products, collagen implants and full-scale cosmetic surgery by all means, but the skull beneath the skin will still get you in the end.

Intercepting a wrinkle or two is as nothing compared with the vast cycles of the universe which lead us all to become part of the elements once more.

As a scientist, Lady Archer knows all this. But it won't stop her - or me - trying hard for just a little longer.