A terrifying new beauty treatment may soon be available here. You immerse your whole body in a bath full of eels the length of a pencil, to exfoliate your skin.
Isn't life dicey enough already, without that? The eels, which probably don't really understand their job description, sometimes wiggle into areas that don't need exfoliating. Health and safety inspector Wendy Nixon recently warned that "there were problems with the procedure, especially for those wearing loose-fitting swimwear". Horrors. Terrible things have happened to people who've had eel baths in China.
What a raving-mad idea. And I'd have thought we'd need all the layers of skin we can get, with the winter coming on and energy bills soaring. But will anyone pay attention the warnings? Probably not. You can warn people till you're blue in the face, they'll still suck bits out, stuff bits in, chop, pierce, dye and roast themselves into the preferred state. But I'm going to advise anyway. Do not blithely trust these treatments – and I speak from experience.
Sometimes I look in the mirror, longing for improvements. So when, a couple of years ago, Daughter nagged me into some teeth whitening, I tried it, because she had blagged some for free, and it is no fun having or being an ageing, whiskery, brown-toothed mother. Off we went to the cosmetic dentist. But bad news. Nothing could be done. My teeth were "banding". Couldn't I see the brown bands? Whitening would only make it worse. So that was it. Doomed to brown, striped teeth. I planned to go into hiding.
Then I noticed, while cleaning my teeth, that for some odd reason, I was more or less ignoring the top right front "banded" bit. Years of tea, coffee and inefficient brushing were probably to blame. So I brushed that area like mad for a while, and hey presto, the banding disappeared.
There must be easier, cheaper and safer ways of improving oneself. If one can be bothered. I saw some whiskery, blubbery walruses on telly, with lumpy, blotchy and pocky areas of skin, but they still looked lovely to me.
