It’s not a Nordic culinary microtrend or a sex thing, but a beauty treatment, in which “Polydeoxyribonucleotides (PDRN) derived from purified fragments of DNA extracted from yes, ‘salmon sperm’” are injected into your face.
It was a litany of lasers, microneedling, injectables and proprietary treatments with silly names that left me shouting crossly at my laptop: “But what does it do?” The only treatment I related to at all was Marina Abramović recounting how a friend of her mother’s put hot mashed potato on her face to temporarily erase wrinkles; Abramović herself uses “thermage radiofrequency”.
In the US, Botox use by 20- to 29-year-olds has increased 28% since 2010, with gen Z buying into “prejuvenation” (another awful portmanteau), fuelled by the poreless perfection offered by filters, staring at themselves on pandemic screens and social media skinfluencers (argh).
It’s not that I’m smugly delighted with my 50-year-old face: the baleful crone in my new passport photo appears, inexplicably, to have a single black eye (actually just a dark circle), adding to the “pensioner arrested after brawl outside bookies” vibe.
Writing in Grazia last week, the Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes described how “women in teaching, policing and the civil service” ask her advice on where to get “good injections”.
