Sylvia Patterson on botox grannies

Last week, a TV show redefined what we mean by the Glamorous Grandmother. Where once she wore a starchy satin gown, a string of pearls and a bouffant hairdo much like Yootha Joyce's magnificent coppery fright-wig in George And Mildred in the 1970s, the new generation, shown through Britain's Youngest Grannies, wore skinny jeans, crop tops and multi-streaked highlights like Everyone Off The Telly because they were approximately 36 years old, the result of two generations of teenage pregnancy.

A speedy one week later and the Glamorous Grandmother is being redefined once again, a grandma who might be the traditional grandma's age - over 60 - but who is doing everything in her considerable economic power to look like someone's 36-year-old daughter. Or even 16-year-old granddaughter. We've entered, say cosmetic surgery giants Transform, the era of the Botox Granny, where 20% of Botox clients are now over 60, while breast implants for the same age range are up, as it were, by 31%, with full face-lifts also stretching upwards by 35%.

Their inspirational role models, say the clinic, are the ever-twinkling Dame Helen Mirren (63) and the ever-fabulous Joan Collins (75), right, a staggering irony considering both these women are ever-dwindling voices in the anti-surgery fightback. Dame Helen, famously, turned down an offer of free Botox for the 2007 Oscars where she won her gong for The Queen. "I'm very vain," she twinkled beforehand, "but I'm not fond of all those needles and scalpels. I'll try to get away with make-up, jewellery and a nice frock." She was, of course, the globally swooned-over belle of that year's ball.

Joan Collins, meanwhile, ascribes her ever-glowing cartoon glamour to "proper food", "activity" and "a happy gene" (plus world-class wig), as someone who tried Botox in its infancy, 10 years ago, and hated it. "It was unbelievably painful and it didn't do anything," she balked in 2006 before lamenting the now everyday Hollywood procedure. "They stick 300 shots of poison into your face," she scoffed. "It's hideous and makes you look like a chipmunk. The plastic surgeons want to make you look young but I don't want to look young, I just want to look good."

A doctor over in America, meanwhile, has now decided the ageing process is something we can literally halt with no needles and scalpels involved. "I truly believe ageing is a progressive inflammatory disease that occurs at a cellular level," averred holistic dermatologist Dr Nicholas Perricone this week, skincare evangelist to the likes of Cate Blanchett, Uma Thurman and Julia Roberts. "And as such," he added, "you can fight it."

And so it's official: in the year of the invention of the Botox Granny, the ageing process is now professionally considered some kind of "curable disease". The thing is, though, the doctor might have a point As the cosmetic surgery profiteers show all the signs of being the only billionaires who will never go bust, perhaps it's time the increasingly age-neurotic population took the advice of the good doctor (a non-surgical pioneer worth $42.4 million himself at the last estimate), stop filling their ever-flowing coffers and "cure" itself instead from "within".

Peruse the advice he's been bugling this week (in lieu of a forthcoming book, which no-one will now need to buy) and it all seems very simple, a four-part technique encompassing a diet rich in salmon and acai berries (Joan's "proper food"), waving a red light gizmo in front of your face (perhaps a 69p red lightbulb will do), the Doctor's own-brand face creams (Joan says Nivea will do) and encouraging a face full of muscles.

This last, apparently, is most important, the loss in our faces of "subcutaneous fat, volume and curves" the thing that ages us most (or, as we know it, looking a bit clappit round the gills). In order to have a fuller face, then, without having a 35-stone body underneath it, the doc recommends facial exercises (gurning like a Cornish fisherman) or "electronic stimulation" (possibly at vast expense, perhaps a vigorous face-knead will do).

"If you look at Angelina Jolie," he marvels, "she has these beautiful apples in her cheeks - they're the result of the muscles in the face. Using electro-stimulation I can give anyone this sort of a look." And that would appear to be that. Follow this advice and 12 weeks later we all wake up and bear an uncanny resemblance to Angelina Jolie.

Those of us with a bloke lying next to us, meanwhile, will find chances are he still bears no resemblance whatsoever to Brad Pitt, as nowhere in any of this week's anti-ageing pronouncements did anything apply to that curiously unconcerned section of the ageing population known as men.

"Women over 50 already form one of the largest groups in the population structure of the Western world," Germaine Greer reminded us the other year. "As long as they like themselves, they will not be an oppressed minority. A grown woman should not have to masquerade as a girl in order to remain in the land of the living."

It's a tragic truth, though, in the era of the Botox Granny, that fewer and fewer of those over 50s are listening to a solitary, worthy word of it. In January, Germaine Greer turns 70. Another Joan, Joan Rivers, meanwhile, is 75. What more do we need to know?