It’s never too late to look your best, even the middle of the Hollywood awards season.
Say you weren’t invited to (or nominated for) the People’s Choice, the Golden Globes or this weekend's Screen Actors Guild Awards. You've still got time to do an about-face if you're invited to the upcoming Grammys, or the Independent Spirits and Oscars in early March.
According to the folks at the M Aesthetics Spa on Sunset Boulevard, famous folks now wait until just weeks before a big event to fill in wrinkles, erase brown spots, plump and tighten saggy necks and jowls and flush out the nasty toxins that keep them from looking fresh for the cameras. And surprise, Beverly Hills dentists report a deluge of patients asking for teeth-whitening this time of year too.
All you need is two weeks. And a Visa, MasterCard or American Express card. Or all three.
“We were jammed with stars who came in for treatments just days before the Golden Globes,” reveals Angela Nice, M’s paramedical aesthetician.
Like who? Asking for names is frowned on. But I managed to get a few: Paris Hilton (semi-permanent faux eyelashes, air-brush tanning and endermologie body sculpting treatments), Daryl Hannah (endermologie), “Entourage” agent Jeremy Piven (You name it. "He practically lives here,” says Nice.), deceased “Lost” (on the show) cutie Maggie Grace (again, those hot semi-permanent lashes) and comedian Kathy Griffin, unfortunately still alive.
Natch, Botox is big. “You need to come in about two weeks ahead of the event,” says Marc Mani, M’s in-house aesthetic plastic surgeon. You may have seen him on The Learning Channel's series, "Body Work." Actresses who aren't spring chickens flock to Mani to banish wrinkles and scowls and to eliminate those annoying upper lip creases. He even gives men and women what he calls a temporary (four month) brow lift with a bit of Botox under the eyebrow. Cost? $17 a unit, which translates to roughly $300-$500.
No time to have your posterior fat sucked out and injected in your forehead furrows? No worries. Restylane is still the fast filler of choice to plump up forehead lines and naso-labial crevices. “Again, you should allow two weeks to let any slight swelling settle down,” Mani cautions. $550 per syringe. Some folks need two or three. Ouch.
The spa's hottest new treatment is the Titan, an infrared light-based contraption that blasts the skin with pulses of light that heats up collagen deep in the dermis, causing collagen to rejuvenate. The skin then tightens with no post-treatment 'down time' (otherwise known as days and weeks spent hiding at home so no one will ask what on earth you had done.)
“The Titan is instant gratification,” says Nice. “It tightens faces, necks, jowls. It works instantly and the results get better over the course of a month. It seems to work better on men, no one knows why.” But it’s pricey. $2,000 for the first treatment, $1,000 for the next two.
And M spa's Red Carpet pièce de résistance? A lymphatic drainage massage combined with endermologie, using a machine that uses vibrating suction to literally draw out toxins and extra fluids trapped in Hollywood’s hardest partying people. “It’s a great fast way to get into that designer gown that’s still just a tiny bit snug,” says Nice. “We call it the zipper magic.”
Eyelashes like Paris Hilton’s will set you back $100 for upper, $300 for upper and lower. But they last three whole weeks! Long enough to do several award shows if you plan well. And oh, don’t forget that all-important awards season golden glow with the M spa’s airbrush all-over tan. Just $45 for one session, three for $120.
Hey, even I can afford that.
