Awards & Accolades

A century ago, "radiant" wasn't a metaphor. Radium was in face creams, tonics and toothpaste, sold as the secret to glowing, youthful skin — while, in factories nearby, young women who painted it onto watch dials were quietly dying of it. This is the story of the glow, the girls, and the reckoning that changed how we protect people from the things we sell them.

Before regulated fillers, before BBLs, before any of it, women were injecting industrial silicone into their bodies at secret "pumping parties." It's one of the darkest chapters in the history of my field — and, uncomfortably, one of the most human. This is the story of how it happened, who it harmed, and why it never really went away.

In the gaslit churchyards of 18th- and 19th-century Britain, there worked a profession that doesn't make it onto many career-day posters: the resurrection men. Grave robbers, body snatchers, "sack-'em-up men" — whatever you called them, their job was to dig up the very freshly buried and sell them, by night, to the anatomy schools.

It's a properly macabre story. It's also, uncomfortably, one of the reasons I can do my job safely. Bear with me.

When supermodel Linda Evangelista revealed that a fat-freezing treatment had left her "brutally disfigured," it put a rare side effect of CoolSculpting on the front pages. For the clinician, this rare complication highlights how important proper consent in aesthetic medicine is.

A tech millionaire spends two million dollars a year, swallows dozens of pills a day, and once had his teenage son's blood pumped into his veins — all to avoid dying. It's a mesmerising spectacle. It's also, for almost everything that matters, a very expensive way of ignoring what we already know. Because the real longevity "hacks" are unglamorous, unpatentable, and backed by mountains of actual evidence. And look — maybe it’s boring, but it’s free.

TikTok would like you to smear rendered beef fat on your face — for glowing, "ancestral," chemical-free skin. As ever, the truth is more boring and more useful than either the evangelists or the eye-rollers will tell you. So let me render it down: what tallow genuinely does, what it absolutely doesn't, and whether you should slather it on.

I first wrote about collagen supplements back in 2020, when the evidence was thin and I was — politely — a skeptic. Half a decade and a great many clinical trials later, the picture has shifted slightly. So here's an honest update: what the newest evidence really shows, where the hype still outruns it, and whether that daily scoop is worth your money.

"Paraben-free" is one of the most successful marketing phrases in beauty history. It's also a cautionary tale. The campaign against a cheap, well-tested, genuinely safe preservative didn't make your skincare cleaner — it handed you more allergies and more contamination, and charged you extra for the privilege.

Here's how one flimsy study in 2004 rewrote the back of every bottle you own — and why fear is a terrible way to choose skincare.

Because the customer has changed. It's no longer sixteen-year-olds with spots. It's ten-year-olds — sometimes seven-year-olds — clutching £68 serums, filming elaborate multi-step routines for TikTok, and using potent anti-ageing ingredients on skin that is, developmentally, a baby's.

We've started calling them "Sephora kids," and it would be amusing if it weren't so harmful.

Let me explain what's actually going on, and — crucially — what the new evidence shows.

If you have spent any time on TikTok lately, you will have met the "morning shed." The premise is simple and strangely satisfying: you go to bed looking like a mummy — layered in serums, an occlusive mask, under-eye patches, a chin strap, a silk bonnet, perhaps a strip of tape across your mouth — and you wake up to peel it all away, revealing skin that is supposedly luminous, lifted and years younger. It is the latest chapter in "sleepmaxxing," the wider trend of optimising every hour of sleep for health and beauty.

I understand the appeal. There is something deeply reassuring about the idea that we can work on ourselves while we do nothing at all.

But as with so many viral rituals, the question I care about is not whether it looks impressive on camera. It is whether it is doing anything, and whether it is safe.