Age before beauty

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One cold and wet day in what passes for spring this year, I find myself standing on the doorstep of a neat bungalow in Finchley, north London. Cars rush by; I am lashed by rain. I am here for an appointment with Neetu Nirdosh, self-styled celebrity skin doctor and one of the UK’s newest, most inventive anti-aging gurus. Skin-care products and supplements bear her brand name, along with a radical approach to the business of growing older.

Nirdosh believes that aging is a disease like any other, and that it should be treated as such. Furthermore, she believes that she has the knowledge and the means to do so, and has founded an empire on both. She wants to cure us — and specifically me — of aging.

I have met Nirdosh before. In February I attended an anti-aging boot camp in Kent, southeast England, which was so exhausting that I came back looking 20 years older. This, however, was not the fault of Nirdosh, who seemed like a source of comfort and a voice of reason among the other, less palatable aspects of the camp. There had been a power play between the hard-line organizers, who wanted us out on drills every second of the day, and Nirdosh, who tended towards the benefits of pampering baths and an hour of meditation over yomping up hills carrying a heavy metal pole.

I’d found Nirdosh and her theories intriguing. In fact, I find the whole issue of anti-aging intriguing. As someone who has never cared much about how I look, I have recently found myself drawn towards various creams and serums, the so-called “elixirs” of youth. The fear of aging is upon me and yet I am not quite sure why. When I look in the mirror I want to see me, but maybe a younger version of me.

Nirdosh herself is 34 and looks a decade younger. She is small and sinewy, with big eyes and the body of a child.

When I first met her, she told me that when she was a child her beautician mother had been a huge influence. She made sure that almost everything her daughter ate or drank was designed to improve her skin. “My school lunch box was crazy: full of tomatoes, half a cucumber, carrots and a pint of milk.” Nirdosh went to medical school and became absorbed by science and its relationship with beauty. She reached the conclusion that youth could be prolonged by changing the hormonal chemistry within our bodies. “Aging is a disease that produces symptoms just like heart disease,” she said as she rubbed a dollop of her face cream on my chin one night at the boot camp. “So we should have a refined preventative treatment protocol as we do with other diseases.”

Nirdosh believes she discovered the key to preventing aging by using herself as a guinea pig. “At med school I wasn’t eating properly,” she recalls. “I was drinking stimulants to remain awake; I wasn’t exercising. I noticed my hair was becoming thinner. I gained loads of weight, became out of shape and felt lethargic. My skin became blotchy and I had fine lines and deep bags. I was suffering from premature aging, and that was the pivotal moment, when I put my plan in to action. Within weeks I had systematically and purposefully reversed aging.” The central idea of her method is to “kick-start” our hormones, specifically attacking the human growth hormone that causes our bodies to suffer old age, including wrinkly skin, bone weakness, muscle loss, fat accumulation and collagen breakdown. Nirdosh believes that a combination of diet, exercise, supplements and treatments will boost anti-aging hormones and rectify the damage caused.