Áilín Quinlan: Face facts, ladies, and abandon this desire for an eternal youth

When someone first mentioned to me that girls in their mid-teens were getting Botox injections in a bid to pre-empt ‘ageing’, I didn’t believe it.

That was a few years ago. The mere idea that a child would believe s/he needed Botox was so deeply chilling, I just refused to think about it.

Now I believe it. Now, it makes sense. We live in an age where the pressure to continually look good and to post evidence of yourself looking utterly, flawlessly fabulous is beyond terrifying.

Forget plastic surgery for a minute.

Think of the American millionaire/billionaire/whatever who had a plasma exchange with his teenage son in an effort to reverse the natural ageing process in his body. Think of the company offering transfusions of teenage plasma to reinvigorate (extremely) affluent oldsters.

Think of the LED light therapy masks, which, it is claimed, do everything from stimulating the production of collagen to zapping spots.

The first time I saw one of those was in a film. An actress was casually wearing one in bed. She looked so incredibly creepy, I had to google it.

Think of the weighted face ball. The vitamin shots. The peptides. The €2,000 facial skin creams. Resveratrol. Think, if you can bear it, of Vladimir Putin, who reputedly believes in the anti-ageing benefits of multiple organ transplants.

We’re absolute suckers when it comes to living forever.

One of the most brilliant – and disturbing – books I’ve ever read is Tokyo, by Mo Hayder, about a young woman obsessed with the 1937 Japanese invasion of the Chinese city of Nanjing, known as the Rape of Nanjing.

At the time I read Tokyo, I didn’t know anything about The Nanjing Massacre, which involved the mass rape and murder of up to 200,000 people on December 13 of that year, after Japanese troops entered the city.

The invasion is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities that ever took place. And, to my shame, up to the time I read the novel, some 15 or 20 years ago, I had never heard of it.

As part of the story, the protagonist, an eccentric academic seeking a piece of rare film footage from the period, crosses paths with an ancient gangster – a fearsome Yakuza boss – who, it is rumoured, owns a sinister elixir of life.

This gruesome concoction keeps the crime-lord healthy far beyond his allotted time-span.

My point is that human beings have long been besotted by the idea of healthy, good-looking longevity, and that we may not always have been overly discriminating about the methods we used in our attempts to delay or halt ageing.

These days, of course, with modern life and ground-breaking medical research being what it is, longevity is a hugely lucrative industry.

Think for a moment at what is pushed at us; at what we feel we must live up to. Cher. Dolly Parton.

Good for them, maybe.

But that’s them.

Look at us. At our society. Such is our desperation about ageing that our children feel they need to have Botox.

The thing is, though, according to a new book by an award-winning UK scientist, there is no fountain of youth. There exists no elixir of life. There’s no such thing as a magical anti-ageing medicine.

One way or another, the biological clock just continues to tick, according to Oxford academic Saul Newman in his book Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science.

Newman said in a recent interview that, at the end of the day, if you want to live a long and healthy life, it’s primarily down to diet, exercise, not smoking and staying away from alcohol. Oh, and seeing your GP now and again.

So it’s basically down to commonsense and a bit of sacrifice. None of which, it should be said, come at €2,000 a pot.

As Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, said: “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”

But no amount of effort, pain, or difficulty will bring you a life of eternal youth. At least not according to Saul Newman, who doesn’t believe in the Blue Zones either.

Two years ago, Newman won an Ig Nobel prize (the Ig Nobel Prize is an annual award celebrating imaginative and unusual scientific study) for his research dismissing the concept of Blue Zones.

These are parts of the world, like Sardinia and Okinawa, where healthy lifestyles reportedly resulted in the world’s highest proportion of disease-free centenarians.

The Blue Zones were an extremely big deal back in the day, so much so that I possess not one, but two, beautifully presented hard-bound and somewhat self-righteous books all about them.

One of these is a cookery book full of recipes for dishes that I have never attempted to make.

Sometimes, it’s good to delay a little - now, thanks to Newman, I get to feel smug about not spending hours trudging through these volumes or carrying out an international trawl for the necessary ingredients.

Respect your smile lines.

They’re signs of a life well lived.

They’re signs of a life well lived.