I won’t pretend it’s not awkward to lie semi-naked on a surgical bed as a man in a white coat painstakingly reads my body – from toe to scalp – like a map. But when I turned 40, I gave myself Dr Christopher Rowland Payne as a present. Not the man himself (which would have been weird, and problematic in terms of gift wrapping) but an hour, every January, in his London Clinic surgery.
Well before I had even the most cursory interest in health and beauty, Dr Rowland Payne was the name being bandied about by the kind of Chelsea girls who wore cornflower-blue cashmere, moved in royal circles and were assigned a dermatologist to keep their skin cyborg-smooth at 16. What seemed laughable then is plain common sense to me today – especially after five years in LA, where every woman has her ‘derm’ on speed dial. (Ditto in France, by the way, where there are 3,000 working dermatologists to our 650.)...