Awards & Accolades

On the night the veil between the living and the dead is supposed to thin, it feels only right to tell you about the people who made their living crossing it — the grave robbers whose grim, illegal trade quietly built the anatomical knowledge that every modern surgeon and doctor, myself included, still relies on.

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.

Because the customer has changed. It's no longer sixteen-year-olds with spots. It's ten-year-olds — sometimes seven-year-olds — clutching £68 serums, filming elaborate multi-step routines for TikTok, and using potent anti-ageing ingredients on skin that is, developmentally, a baby's.

We've started calling them "Sephora kids," and it would be amusing if it weren't so harmful.

Let me explain what's actually going on, and — crucially — what the new evidence shows.

If you have spent any time on TikTok lately, you will have met the "morning shed." The premise is simple and strangely satisfying: you go to bed looking like a mummy — layered in serums, an occlusive mask, under-eye patches, a chin strap, a silk bonnet, perhaps a strip of tape across your mouth — and you wake up to peel it all away, revealing skin that is supposedly luminous, lifted and years younger. It is the latest chapter in "sleepmaxxing," the wider trend of optimising every hour of sleep for health and beauty.

I understand the appeal. There is something deeply reassuring about the idea that we can work on ourselves while we do nothing at all.

But as with so many viral rituals, the question I care about is not whether it looks impressive on camera. It is whether it is doing anything, and whether it is safe.

Somewhere in the last year, a remarkable number of people woke up, looked in the mirror, and diagnosed themselves with "cortisol face."

You've seen the videos: a slightly puffy morning selfie, a dramatic arrow pointing at rounded cheeks, and a confident voice explaining that stress has flooded your body with cortisol and bloated your face — but don't worry, because a "cortisol detox," an "adrenal cocktail," or a tub of some hopeful powder will fix it in two weeks. It's compelling. It names a thing you've definitely felt (I don't love my face some mornings either), hands you a villain (stress, cortisol, modern life), and sells you a fix.

Perfect misinformation, really.

So let me do what I do. There is a real medical story under here — it's just not the one TikTok is selling you.

There's a whole corner of the internet teaching teenage boys and young men to chase a chiselled jaw — some of it harmless, some of it genuinely dangerous, and quite a lot of it built on the advice of two dentists who've since been struck off.

Here's what actually works, what's nonsense, and the thing underneath it all that I think we need to talk about.

Most of my work — and most of this blog — has, historically, spoken to women. But there's a trend I can't really ignore any longer, because it's aimed squarely at boys, some of them very young, and because bits of it are landing people in trouble. It's called looksmaxxing, and if you have a teenage son, or you are a young man, or you've simply fallen down a certain kind of TikTok rabbit hole, you'll already know the vocabulary: mewing, mouth-taping, bonesmashing, "canthal tilt," "hunter eyes."

The easy move is to mock this latest trend, but mockery is exactly the wrong response. Let me explain what it all is, sort the sensible from the silly from the genuinely harmful — and then talk about the part that actually matters.