Completed your A-levels? It"s time for the nose job

She is not the only a single looking for perfection, and nose jobs are a perennially popular surgical decision. The plastic surgical treatment sector is estimated to be really worth £3.six billion, with 3,891 nose jobs taking place last year – an boost of 19 per cent on the yr ahead of. The figures do not reveal a breakdown in age, but Charles East, a advisor surgeon in facial plastic surgical treatment and a member of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, says he sees about twenty teenage women a week who want nose jobs – and the summer season months, in certain, are the season for them.

“It’s the most frequent operation amid teens and it’s escalating,” he says. “There’s that age group in which their dad and mom have the implies to spend for it ahead of they go to school, or start off a new job. At this time of yr the workplace is total of mothers and fathers saying, ‘She’s finished her A-levels now, so we want to get this done’.”

His customers are both young women who have support from their mothers and fathers, acknowledging their daughter’s misery and just wanting her to be happy, or older ladies who have waited to create themselves financially before changing the noses they’ve hated for many years.

Sophie Cooper, 20, from New Eltham, south-east London, acquired her nose job as a 21st birthday present from her parents. “I’d wanted to get my nose fixed since I was a teenager,” she says. “When I told my mum, she knew how much it meant to me and supplied to support me out. I planned to have the operation in time for my birthday. Photographs from your 21st keep with you forever, and the final factor I needed was to look back and don’t forget how I looked. I booked my operation in a few months before my birthday, as I wanted it healed in time. My mum chipped in to aid cover some of the charges and it was the ideal existing I could wish for.”

Worryingly, the demand has also led to some significantly less scrupulous medical doctors entering this still below-regulated healthcare arena. In accordance to David Roberts, a director of Harley Street Nasal Clinic and consultant nasal plastic surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital, 60 per cent of United kingdom sufferers decide on surgeons based on value, namely the cheaper the better. It is minor wonder that he spends 85 per cent of his time correcting botched noses.

Mr Roberts understands the need to have to assess patients on their physical and psychological compatibility prior to commencing surgery. “I refuse ten per cent of all the patients I see. Either their nose is not abnormal or they want to attain results that are unattainable,” he says. So would the 106 degrees of perfection be a support in his perform?

“This quest to define perfection is not new. Da Vinci was studying facial proportions and angles lengthy prior to some plastic surgeon came up with an perfect. It is well recognised that surgeons are looking for ideal angles, but there is no 1 size fits all. For a taller female, for illustration, 106 degrees wouldn’t perform at all, you would finish up staring straight up her nose.”

Michael Prager, a cosmetic medical professional and co-writer of the Perceptions of Attractiveness study, is equally damning of cloning particular characteristics. “These angles hardly ever perform in the actual globe,” he says. “And they are certainly not assured to make you far more desirable. Let’s not fail to remember that our ideals are continuously modifying. In the previous, rhinoplasty manufactured noses brief – noses that are now deemed piggy. Nowadays we discover Angelina’s Jolie’s lips beautiful, whereas in the past they would have been too large. There are too many factors involved when assessing a encounter, and consequently creating such rigid angles the best is a recipe for catastrophe.”

In my earlier perform as an undercover journalist, I spent some time investigating unscrupulous surgeons for ITV’s Facelifts From Hell. There was one particular particular rhinoplasty specialist, who practised mostly in the States but would come to a leading London hotel twice a 12 months to groom new patients with his fantastical surgical prowess (fake), new procedures with guaranteed quick recovery time (fake) and outstanding outcomes (also fake). He promised dramatic encounter-modifying effects – and in truth they had been encounter-changing, but for the worse.

He was also identified for carrying out pointless operations, persuading younger women their noses had been so deformed that surgical treatment was their only option. I went to visit him with my ordinary nose, to see if he would consider to coax me into surgical procedure. Rigged with secret cameras, my producer and I filmed the surgeon talking of how he could flip my encounter into that of a supermodel by shaving down a slight bump on my nose (which I had in no way observed ahead of) and lengthening the tip so it wasn’t so short. He then turned to my producer, who had a more substantial nose, and said: “You, I can actually help. You search like you have been hit in the face with a cricket bat.”

But we cannot lay the blame for our fixations with our flaws at the feet of plastic surgeons alone. David Roberts believes that we’re difficult-wired to discover certain functions appealing and, regardless of our ethnicities, we are programmed to discover small, delicate noses prettier than pronounced ones.

Of program, this can trigger particular difficulties when heritage means that your nose will necessarily be bigger than that of, say, Scarlett Johansson. “We see a lot more and far more Middle Eastern and Asian girls requesting rhinoplasty,” Mr Roberts says. “They want a a lot more refined and Western-seeking nose, so we develop up flat ones and shave down the hooked ones.”

But he is also keen to shield the cultural identity of his sufferers and is always pleased to hear some sufferers inquire for their noses to be “  ‘de‑emphasised’, rather than ‘take the Jewishness out of it’. The very best nose task is the one you don’t recognize. If men and women consider you’ve been on vacation or had a new haircut, rather than a nose work, then I have done my work effectively. That’s why the excellent 106-degree nose does not exist. It wouldn’t suit every face and it would be wrong to attempt it.”

Surely the more essential point is not no matter whether this 106‑degree nose will suit everyone, but that this prescription for perfection is just the most recent in a extended line of damaging messages sent out to young women.

Extra reporting by Radhika Sanghani

Completed your A-levels? It"s time for the nose job

Why fertility is far from completed at 40

“Over the past few years, we have seen much scaremongering about older women’s fertility,” says Ann Furedi, chief executive of BPAS. “From career women leaving it too late to older women banking on IVF to conceive, these stories lead many women to dramatically underestimate their own fertility later in life.

“Fertility does decline as you get older. But the drop is not as great as we are sometimes led to believe. For women who don’t want to fall pregnant, the message is simple: use contraception until you have passed your menopause.”

Cherie Blair was astonished to discover, at 45, that he was carrying her fourth child. “I thought: ‘I can’t be, I’m too old. It must be menopause,’ ” she said. Actress Halle Berry last year revealed she was pregnant aged 46. “This has been the biggest surprise of my life, to tell you the truth. I thought I was kind of past the point where this could be a reality for me.”

TV and radio presenter Gaby Roslin was similarly stunned, aged 41, to learn she was having a second child. “It was a surprise. I said to my obstetrician: ‘But I’m so old!’ He told me I was talking nonsense and that he had women of 46 on his books – and he’s right. He said it’s not an age thing, it’s down to how healthy you are.”

Before the introduction of reliable contraception, older mothers were common, with women giving birth to their last child when they were grandmothers. In the Twenties, the average age a woman had her last child was 42.

Today, forty-something mothers are more likely to be first-timers, and their numbers are rising once again. Office for National Statistics figures show that pregnancy rates for over-40s have more than doubled in the past 24 years, with 14 conceptions per 1,000 women aged 40-plus compared with six per 1,000 in 1990.

Today, many twenty-something women are saddled with student debt. The average age to buy a first property is now 35, the age when women’s fertility supposedly “goes over a cliff”. One in three British men and one in five women aged between 20 and 34 still lives with their parents. No wonder the average age for a British woman to have her first child is 30, and 35 for university-educated women.

Among my own middle-class peer group, none of my close friends had her first child before 30. The vast majority were older than 35 and several were in their forties. I became pregnant at 35 and 37, with no problems and no regrets that I’d spent my carefree twenties focusing on friends and career. Being labelled an “elderly primigravida” in my birth notes only made me laugh.

But panic among young women has been increasing. The tipping point came in 2002, when US academic Sylvia Ann Hewlett published Baby Hunger, containing the unnerving statistic (that was misleading, since it only covered a tiny sample) that 42 per cent of career women had no children at the age of 40, and most deeply regretted it.

I frequently meet women in their mid-thirties who fret about their fertility. “My boyfriend’s 10 years younger than me and doesn’t like me pressuring him to marry me, but I’m 36”; “I left my husband because he was unfaithful – I should have done it sooner but I didn’t dare because I wanted to be a mum”; and “I’m not sure I’m really in love with him, but I’m 34 so I’d better marry him than risk never being a mother,” are just three stories I’ve heard in recent months.

“I was consumed by anxiety that my age meant doom,” wrote the US academic Jean Twenge, whose recent article on fertility scaremongering in the Atlantic magazine went viral. “I was not alone. Women on internet message boards write of scaling back their careers, or having fewer children than they’d like to, because they can’t bear the thought of trying to get pregnant after 35.” Twenge had three children, all born after her 35th birthday.

The fertility expert Zita West says that she constantly sees clients “panicking unnecessarily”. “Modern life puts up so many hurdles for women in their twenties that it’s not easy for them to have babies at the ‘ideal’ time, and then there’s so much anxiety and impatience from clients in their thirties.

“Couples put huge pressure on one another during ovulation and it’s increasingly common in my consultations to see men who have performance anxiety around sex and ovulation. They say: ‘Oh, my God, it’s never going to happen’ when they’ve only been trying for three months, or they live in different countries and only have sex once a month. Often they rush into having IVF when they don’t need it.”

In fact, the true statistics about female fertility are far less terrifying than is widely believed. Women do lose 90 per cent of their eggs by 30, but that still leaves them with 10,000, when only one is needed to make a baby.

Then there’s the statistic that one in three women aged between 35 and 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, taken from a 2004 article in the journal Human Reproduction. These figures do not come from large, scientifically conducted studies of contemporary women, but from French birth records from 1670 to 1830, covering women with no access to modern health care or nutrition.

In contrast, the few studies of women born in the 20th century and trying to conceive are markedly more positive. One 2004 study of 770 European women found that 82 per cent of 35- to 39-year-olds would conceive within a year if they had sex once a week, compared with a very similar 86 per cent of 27- to 34-year-olds.

Consultant gynaecologist Tina Cotzias agrees that “older” women shouldn’t be daunted. “Yes, chances of pregnancy decline with age but this doesn’t mean it will never happen to you as an individual. And, of course, there are many reasons why it might not be right for a woman to have babies in her twenties, not least that she may not have met the right man. What’s important is not to scare single women, but to communicate to a 28-year-old who is with the man she wants to spend the rest of her life with that she might be better off trying for a baby now than delaying it 10 years.”

Cotzias warns that statistics are gloomier for IVF patients, with only 4 per cent of IVF cycles ending in a live birth in women aged 42 and older. Miscarriage rates soar in the over-40s, from an average 7 per cent to 18 per cent, and the risk of stillbirth doubles.

On the plus side, research indicates that “older” mothers usually have more solid marriages, command higher salaries and live longer than women who have their children in their twenties. When interviewed, these women almost invariably report that choosing to delay motherhood was the best choice they’ve made.

Ellie Stoneley, from Cambridge, author of the blog “Mush-Brained Ramblings”, was 47 when she conceived her daughter – Hope, now two – after IVF. “I had a straightforward pregnancy, and the medical staff could not have been more supportive. I get tired from time to time, but so do all new parents and I know if I’d had Hope younger, I’d have been trying to go out more in the evenings and would have found it much harder to get up in the night. Now all my energy’s focused on my daughter. I wish I’d had a child younger as I’d have loved lots, but I do feel incredibly blessed.”

Ellen Arnison went on, aged 42, to give birth to a healthy son, now four.

“Being pregnant in my forties was tougher than in my thirties,” says Arnison, author of another blog, “In A Bun Dance”. “But motherhood was easier. I was much more relaxed, because I was more confident.

“I could be paranoid, but I do sometimes feel there is a sexist agenda in telling women they must have babies at what’s also a crucial time in their careers,” she continues. “The truth is there’s no ‘best’ time for a baby – you take what life brings you.”

Why fertility is far from completed at 40

Anthony Seldon: I have completed all I can for Wellington, but not for Joanna

We met at Oxford in the Seventies, when I was directing plays, and she was renowned for her extraordinary intellect: her tutor, Professor Marilyn Butler, described her as the brightest pupil she had ever identified. With our three youngsters grown up and in their twenties, we have learnt to value every single other and the instances we invest together more deeply. I admire our children’s strength and love, which make them so constructive with her. A large point came two weekends ago at the London Marathon, exactly where our elder daughter’s boyfriend proposed to her 200 metres from the finish line – a moment of joy for Joanna ahead of she had to return to hospital two days later on.

Joanna’s sickness has been a principal issue in the announcement this week that I will be leaving Wellington College following year. The relentless nature of the occupation prevents me spending time with Joanna and the children, and I now want to be with them more than the running of a giant school like Wellington permits.

The college has one,060 13- to 18-yr-olds, the wonderful vast majority of them boarders. To look after so many younger people – all with their ambitions, person characters and considerations – is far from effortless. Most of the time they behave impeccably and merit the trust we area in them. It is when factors go awry, when the phone rings in the middle of the night, that you know what being a head truly signifies.

I oversee 6 colleges in our group, including Wellington Academy, the state school we sponsor in Wiltshire. My BlackBerry is by no means far more than two feet away 365 days a 12 months. The task demands continuous vigilance. Because Joanna’s diagnosis, I have worked ever tougher, feeling guilty that I am not running Wellington effectively, and have taken up working marathons in assist of her cancer charity.

I am leaving also simply because I think I have carried out all that I can, and a fresh figure is required to consider the college forward. The college is heavily in demand. The benefits up coming yr will place us in the Prime 25 in Britain, and an inspection report final term gave us the prime rating in every single element. I do not want to be a single of these leaders who stays on too prolonged.

When I became Master eight many years in the past, 1 of my aims was returning Wellington to its historic spot as one particular of Britain’s fantastic colleges. I needed, even more, to supply a vision of what schooling can be. So, with complete governor backing, we introduced the Worldwide Baccalaureate as an different to A-degree and GCSE, created our very own “eight intelligences” model, instituted wellbeing and character training, grew to become a educating college, opened schools abroad, ran left-discipline conferences and schooling festivals, and designed innovative studying, educating and partnership programmes. The independent sector has been slow to reform – yet carrying out so, and developing lasting bridges with the state sector, are the best ways of guaranteeing its survival and good results in the 21st century.

Leaving Wellington will be a huge wrench. Heading a boarding school is far a lot more than a occupation: it is a complete way of existence. I go to rest considering about the occupation and wake up early in the morning to the sounds of college daily life even now thinking about it. Our young children have lived in head’s houses at the heart of each and every school and grew to accept getting youngsters and grownups at breakfast, lunch and dinner. We always sought to fill the houses with the existence of the school, with a by no means-ending succession of going to speakers and occasions to enrich the younger. More than something I will miss these youthful folks, the one hundred and far more lunches and dinners I have every 12 months with them at the Master’s Lodge, cheering them on in matches, directing plays, attending concerts, educating and investing time talking to them. They are continuously fascinating, energising and existence-improving. My greatest desire for them has been for them to go on and do excellent in the globe, and to locate which means in their lives.

I often explained I would leave Wellington when I felt the teachers have been turning out to be buddies. I adore their firm, and the intellect, warmth and humanity they deliver to the college. The big occasions I will miss also, for no one particular does grand like Wellington. Speech Day sees 5,000 in the Massive Top enthralled by the pupils’ singing, dancing, drama and ensemble performances our Field Gun teams at the British Military Tournament the numerous bespoke traditions, including the Be The Duke game of tag the yearly Kingsley’s race for all the community, which finishes operating through Swan Lake and Maniacs, the everyday swim in the outdoor pool every single morning in the summertime term. Handful of items are as sweet as viewing the fantastic sporting set pieces: nowadays the 1st XI cricketers are enjoying Eton on Turf.

We will miss the community the most, as opposed to anything at all else outside, possibly, the military and diplomatic missions abroad. 1 wife has sewn a particular bag to carry Joanna’s drip yet another bakes cakes to suit her particular diet program colleagues and mothers and fathers rally about and help with the purchasing, and walked our puppy, Trevor, until finally he had to be offered away final month.

Up coming yr sees the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Joanna is completing her guide on the death of the Duke of Wellington in 1852 and the foundation of Wellington University by Queen Victoria seven years later on. I hope too to see her novels and short stories published. She is a far better author than me, and reads exquisitely too, most recently at lectures on my new books on public schools and the Wonderful War, and the British embassy in Washington.

Deep down I have often had a sense of what the future would deliver. No longer. I promised Joanna soon after my guide on Gordon Brown that I would not publish an additional on a prime minister. Ever forgiving, she has allowed me to compose on David Cameron. She understands how much I have loved speaking to men and women above the past twenty years about the inner life of Downing Street, and I hope the point of view has produced me a far better Head and a stronger and far more rounded individual. Whether or not it will give me the strength for what lies ahead, we shall see.

Certainly I identified it far from effortless this week telling the staff about my departure and the information of Joanna, even though I joked to the pupils that I was leaving for Manchester United. We know we have the two had immensely fortunate and privileged lives, no matter what might occur in the long term. Our faith has deepened. I come to feel nothing but gratitude and hope.

Anthony Seldon: I have completed all I can for Wellington, but not for Joanna