Awards & Accolades

Let's start with a phrase you've said a hundred times without thinking about it: "mad as a hatter."

It isn't just a bit of whimsy from Alice in Wonderland. For centuries, hat-makers used mercury to turn animal fur into felt — and breathing its fumes, day after day, in poorly-ventilated workshops slowly poisoned them. The result was a syndrome doctors called erethism: tremors (the "hatter's shakes"), crippling anxiety and irritability, memory loss, personality change. An entire trade was, quite literally, being driven mad by a heavy metal. Mercury is a spectacular poison — it wrecks the kidneys and the nervous system — and we have known this for a very, very long time.

Which makes what I'm about to tell you all the more depressing. Because mercury didn't just disappear when the hat factories shut down. Today, it's in skin-lightening creams — and it's still poisoning people, right now, in 2026.

A century ago, "radiant" wasn't a metaphor. Radium was in face creams, tonics and toothpaste, sold as the secret to glowing, youthful skin — while, in factories nearby, young women who painted it onto watch dials were quietly dying of it. This is the story of the glow, the girls, and the reckoning that changed how we protect people from the things we sell them.

Before regulated fillers, before BBLs, before any of it, women were injecting industrial silicone into their bodies at secret "pumping parties." It's one of the darkest chapters in the history of my field — and, uncomfortably, one of the most human. This is the story of how it happened, who it harmed, and why it never really went away.

In the gaslit churchyards of 18th- and 19th-century Britain, there worked a profession that doesn't make it onto many career-day posters: the resurrection men. Grave robbers, body snatchers, "sack-'em-up men" — whatever you called them, their job was to dig up the very freshly buried and sell them, by night, to the anatomy schools.

It's a properly macabre story. It's also, uncomfortably, one of the reasons I can do my job safely. Bear with me.

When supermodel Linda Evangelista revealed that a fat-freezing treatment had left her "brutally disfigured," it put a rare side effect of CoolSculpting on the front pages. For the clinician, this rare complication highlights how important proper consent in aesthetic medicine is.

A tech millionaire spends two million dollars a year, swallows dozens of pills a day, and once had his teenage son's blood pumped into his veins — all to avoid dying. It's a mesmerising spectacle. It's also, for almost everything that matters, a very expensive way of ignoring what we already know. Because the real longevity "hacks" are unglamorous, unpatentable, and backed by mountains of actual evidence. And look — maybe it’s boring, but it’s free.

TikTok would like you to smear rendered beef fat on your face — for glowing, "ancestral," chemical-free skin. As ever, the truth is more boring and more useful than either the evangelists or the eye-rollers will tell you. So let me render it down: what tallow genuinely does, what it absolutely doesn't, and whether you should slather it on.

I first wrote about collagen supplements back in 2020, when the evidence was thin and I was — politely — a skeptic. Half a decade and a great many clinical trials later, the picture has shifted slightly. So here's an honest update: what the newest evidence really shows, where the hype still outruns it, and whether that daily scoop is worth your money.

"Paraben-free" is one of the most successful marketing phrases in beauty history. It's also a cautionary tale. The campaign against a cheap, well-tested, genuinely safe preservative didn't make your skincare cleaner — it handed you more allergies and more contamination, and charged you extra for the privilege.

Here's how one flimsy study in 2004 rewrote the back of every bottle you own — and why fear is a terrible way to choose skincare.