How to get perfect skin like celebrities

International facialist Linda Meredith's clients have included the Queen and Madonna. Here she laments the obsession with looking young...

There's no such thing any longer as dry, oily or combination skin. We are all dehydrated because of our exposure to chemicals and preservatives and the medication we take. Our lifestyle is completely different from 50, 60 years ago. As soon as you take an aspirin, you're dehydrated. If you're on the pill or antibiotics, you're dehydrated.

My approach is not to deal with skin types but skin problems. If you have dryness and oiliness and ageing, you can put three different products on top of one another, which in days gone by would have been contradictory.

When people tell me a client looks flawless, I say, "You don't see her in real life with no make-up on." I know what they look like close up, and it's not perfect. A lot of the younger ones like Sienna (Miller) smoke, drink and are on and off planes. They need me more than before, because we live in a different world.

Many of my clients are airbrushed in pictures. There are only a handful of people with flawless skin I know, including actress Rosamund Pike and model Claudia Schiffer. Their skin is what you see in the photo. Rosamund is an English rose, her skin is dewy, moist — perfect.

My clients do tell me their problems, whether with work or a partner, and we've got several divorces going on at the moment — we hear about it all.

Even though mine is a small salon, when people come in here I like to think they feel safe, that they are going to relax, even though we don't do the big pamper thing — we are more result-based treatments.

But no matter who the client is, they have to come to me. I was asked to go to the Palace to do Camilla (Parker Bowles) before she got married but I refused. You can't take everything out of the salon. I said I would do it in the middle of the night or six o clock in the morning on a Sunday. I only broke my rule once — to do Madonna's eyebrows for her wedding and I'd never do it again.

As my clients get older, I tell them to wait for a facelift rather than injecting everything. I particularly don't like heavy fillers — they damage tissue, cause broken capillaries and you end up with blue veins. If you damage cells, it's like somebody punching you.

Our obsession with youth and the need to stop the ageing process is sad because, if you have a problem in your twenties and thirties looking in the mirror and seeing what's there, how will you deal with it when you're 60 or 70?