You beauty!

The first sign of ageing? You start to notice the Beauty of Youth. All around you. And to think thoughts like: ‘If only I had known how lovely I was at 18, rather than loathing every cell in my body.’ Sometimes I want to collar girls and be the crazed crone who clutches at their shoulders with a wizened claw and tells them to… Oh, I don’t know what I’d tell them. They have to find out for themselves.

This awareness usually hits when skin slackens just an imperceptible bit. There is no desire to delete the years (what kind of maniac would want to go through all that again?) but there is the yearning for freshness.

Véronique Simon is a French (bien sur) cosmetic doctor with a skincare line based on plant-derived antioxidants that stimulate epidermal renewal. Her Complement is designed to protect against free radicals (Cigarette, anyone? Pollution, anyone? Unrefined sugar, anyone? Life, anyone?) and to firm things up.

Sticky stuff, I use it at night and am now happy to go out without tinted moisturiser as my skin tone has evened out and there are fewer pimples. My skin is so soft, which I noticed the first morning after I used Complement when, still in bed, I absent-mindedly reached up to rub my face and touched upon something unprecedentedly velvety. The clock has not turned back but the ticking has muted. I can gaze upon those tortured teenagers with admiration undimmed by envy.

Simon Thérapie Complement, £85 for 15ml (simontherapie.com)