Readers and friends ask me all the time how to get rid of undereye circles, and I always have to disappoint them with the unsatisfactory answer: creams and serums might help a teeny bit, but not much, since the problem is often a hereditary pigmentation problem.  Thursday Styles devotes an entire article to it, explaining that excess pigmentation and dilated veins are the two main culprits, and bemoaning that—despite the 50 plus creams at Sephora devoted to the problem, not to mention the $1.8 billion spent in 2006 on banishing dark circles—few products are actually effective.  The article recommends products that contain plumping ingredients like AHAs, or vitamins C and K to thicken skin and lays out the unsexy truth that sometimes the dermatologist or (eek!) plastic surgeon is the best and only recourse.  Nobody really wants to hear it (”But, but, can’t I just spend money at Neiman’s???”  Nein), but for severe problems, fillers like Juvederm or Restylane and lasers to target pigmentation are often the only things that work. 

Seeing as she’s the beauty director of Vogue UK, you might assume Alexandra Shulman to be an enthusiastic champion of various cosmetic procedures, but in this fascinating editorial in today’s Daily Mail, she claims to have never had a single bit of “work” done.  Women are getting Botox and facelifts and Restylane injections, she says, because we want to look younger…but the fact that we’re emphatically not getting any younger makes every tweak a more insistent form of denial.  It’s a wonderfully valid point…but can’t you take it even further and then cast the net of derision over the entire anti-aging products industry?  When you boil it to the core—which is ultimately a terror of aging—what’s the difference between Botox, eyelifts and the bimonthly purchase of peptide and antioxidant creams?

My favorite quote comes at the very end of the article: ‘We broke through the glass ceiling, and we broke the gender barrier, with a tremendous amount of effort, and now we all want to look like Atomic Kittens (a UK pop band),’ she said. ‘Where is the emancipation in that?‘