Aesthetic Medical Ltd

The neck shows it first.

You can look after your face for years and still get caught out from the chin down. I see it most weeks: lovely, well-kept skin that stops in a hard line at the jaw.

It isn’t neglect. The skin on the neck is thinner, it has far fewer oil glands than your face, and it creases every time you turn your head. It was always going to age quicker.

And honestly, no one ever tells you to go lower. Every routine you’ve been shown stops at the jaw, so that’s where most of us stop too. The neck and décolletage get whatever’s left on your hands, if that.

What I’d rather do is carry the same skin-quality work past the jaw, down through the neck and décolletage, planned around your skin and at a pace that suits you. You can spend years on your face and still be let down by the bit underneath it.

Ageing, honestly.

No one sits you down and warns you what menopause does to your skin. So here it is, from someone who sees it every week.

When oestrogen falls, collagen goes with it. Research suggests up to a third can disappear in the first five years alone. That’s why it feels so sudden: the moisturiser stops working, the jawline softens, the lines arrive all at once. It isn’t vanity, and it isn’t your fault. It’s biology.

You didn’t imagine it. The mirror wasn’t lying, and neither was your gut.

Here’s the honest part. Nothing turns the clock back. What genuinely helps is unglamorous and real: SPF, a barrier-first routine, and where it’s right for you, medical-grade treatments that rebuild your own collagen, mapped to your face, never a template.

There’s a trend doing the rounds this summer that I can’t stay quiet about: people online telling you to bin the sunscreen.

The arguments always sound just clever enough. Sunscreen’s toxic. You need bare sun for your vitamin D. The bit of SPF in your make-up will do. There’s a sliver of truth buried in each one, stretched into advice that’ll quietly cost you your skin.

Here’s the part that isn’t up for debate: most of the visible ageing I’m asked to soften, the fine lines, the brown patches, the dullness, started as sun. Not genes, not your pillowcase. Sun.

So keep it simple. A daily SPF you’ll actually wear, topped up when you’re out in it. Skip the base tans and the ten panic-bought serums.

And if years of summers have already left their mark, that’s genuinely something I can help soften in clinic. No lecture, I promise. Start the boring habit today, and let’s talk about the rest whenever you’re ready.

Individual results vary. Suitability assessed at consultation.

You’ve definitely seen it. The “salmon DNA” treatment, usually filed under a nickname that makes everyone pull a face.

Here’s the calm, grown-up version from someone who does under-eye and skin-quality work for a living.

It’s called polynucleotides: tiny chains of purified DNA, originally from salmon. It’s a world away from filler and won’t add a scrap of volume. What it does is work on skin quality, which is why people usually ask about it for that thin, crêpey under-eye that has them looking shattered after a full night’s sleep.

Now the part nobody films for the trend: it’s a course of a few sessions, and the change creeps up on you over weeks. There’s no overnight version. If someone’s promising you a transformation by Saturday, they’re selling something.

So if it’s been sitting in your saved folder, message me before you book it anywhere. We’ll work out whether your skin would actually thank you for it, or whether your money belongs elsewhere.

Individual results vary. Suitability assessed at consultation.