DEATH AND THE PLASTIC MAIDEN

Supermodel Naomi Campbell is fuming after her name was linked to Botox pioneer Dr Jean-Louis Sebagh through two stories in Hello! magazine. The 35-year-old catwalk queen has previously denied having any form of cosmetic enhancement.

Cast in bronze or carved from alabaster,
surviving on a diet of air and pasta,
models waft through the pages of fashion magazines
like goddesses littering a eugenicist’s dreams.

Merely by their looks, models live and die,
brief apples of the fashion world’s eye.
Perfectly ephemeral, these catwalk queens
must hand on their designer jeans

or trade their fading, youthful skins
for plastic noses, breasts and chins.
To keep younger rivals firmly at bay
they botox their old age blues away.

Part of staying young is the attitude
and you admit defeat if you collude
with the surgeon against signs of age
to create tight new skin like a plastic cage

that will stretch, the older you get,
into a rictus of plasticised regret.
Your face is the history of your life;
it is utterly devalued by a lying knife.