Somewhat like my sister chucking out all of her out-of-date spices, New Year is the time that I like to overhaul my makeup bag. 

I say 'bag', but it's actually a series of trays arranged on my landing windowsill - just about the only place in the house where I can sit in good light and do my makeup.

Once you're over 40, your makeup should just be about looking brighter, healthier and better, so the key tools are primer, concealer and blush, to create a healthy glow, and foundation - if you need it - to even out the complexion. An uneven complexion is a far greater sign of ageing than are wrinkles, if looking younger is something that bothers you.

Anyway, most of us don't wear half of our makeup, so get out everything you own and have a look at it. The average life of a makeup item is six months - if any of your items are older than this, it's time to think about chucking them out. The mascara tube, in particular, is a perfect breeding ground for bacteria, so don't take any risks with mascaras. 

Pressed powders and pressed eyeshadows that are getting an oily or grubby surface should also be thrown away, along with any makeup items that use a built-in brush and are more than six months old - this includes things like Touche Eclat. If you have a favourite colour that you just can't bear to get rid off, try sandpapering off the surface of the powder until you get to fresh powder underneath. 

If you have glittery eyeshadows that you don't wear (most of us have bought eye makeup that has proved way-too-glittery on a softening eyeline) and they are in pale shades, crush them up and recycle them as loose body powders: you can even mix them into your body lotion. 

Clean out your makeup bag/box/drawer/shelf and disinfect it, and wipe over all your brushes with an alcohol wipe (you should be washing these out once a week anyway, to avoid infection).

Then take a look at what you have. IMHO, an over-40s babe's makeup bag should can usefully contain the following:

* Smashbox skin primer for a perfect satin finish, with or without makeup.

* Foundation of choice (mine's Dior Airflash).

* Loose powder (I use Yve Rocher).

* Pressed powder (I use Dior).

* Bronzer if you wear it.

* Blusher in the form of gel or cream (for no-makeup days), and powder (for last-minute application) - two shades, one with an apricot tint and one with a rose tint.

* A good quality eyeshadow palette containing brown, flesh colour, cream or gold and one or two in-between shades. I'm currently using Gemey-Maybelline. 

* Dark brown eyeliner pencil (black if you're dark). I use Revlon. 

* White or pale pink eyeliner pencil to open out the eye (also use the pink one below your browline). I use Eyecare. 

* Mascara in black, brown or browny-black and a waterproof version for swimming/weddings etc.  Also clear mascara if you wear it. (I favour Maybelline and La Roche Posay).

* Eyebrow pencil (mine's an Ultima).

* Lipliner in the same colour as your lips when you bite them - also use for infill (I use Yves Rocher). 

* Lip balm, red lipstick, pink lipstick, clear lipgloss (I use various makes, but favour Revlon and Chanel for their colour density).  

When it comes to tools, I couldn't get by without:

Microfoam sponges for applying powder and foundation (Boots' own).

Big fluffy powder brush for loose powder (Yves Rocher).  

Blusher brush (Yves Rocher).

Lip brush (Yves Rocher).

Clean mascara wand for recombing lashes.

Eyebrow brush (mine's on the end of an Ultima pencil).

Eyelash curlers (Boots).

Eyeshadow brush (Yves Rocher).

Eyeliner brush (Yves Rocher).  

Everything else can really be discarded. If things are still in their clingwrap, give them to charity, but if they're used, bin them, and go stock up on decent replacements. Like a capsule fashion wardrobe, a capsule makeup wardrobe needs to be slim and efficient, not stuffed to the gills with things you don't wear.  

I was corresponding with a perfumisto friend recently when it dawned on my that in some ways, you know, I really am starting from absolute scratch when it comes to perfume. 

Tania Sanchez defines the first phase of perfume addiction as watching your mum put it on when she gets ready for the evening - the first hint of the fascinating, glamourous world outside your four walls when you're a small child.

The problem there is, my mum never went out. My parents literally went out once a year - to the 'do' at the colliery where my father worked as a miner - and that is precisely how often she wore perfume (one of those many things of which my father did not approve).

She used a tiny weeny little black bottle of Coty's L'Aimant (which means slightly more than just 'magnet' in French). It was her favourite perfume, but she wasn't allowed to wear it the rest of the year, nor any form of deodorant, nor use fabric softener, or air freshener, nor did we have scented soap in the house (or toothpaste either, but that's another story).

Our toilet (nothing so grand as a 'bathroom) smelled of the puritan wholesomeness of shit, carbolic and Vim and to this day, the smell of Jeyes Fluid can make me homesick. Maybe once a year I was given a present of skin-scouring bath salts (six to a pack) or bath oil pearls by some kind relative, and then I'd have to wait for another year.  

When I was 13, my aunty Margie gave me Astral Skin Creme Soap and the luxury of it overwhelmed me. Soap that actually lathered (my father baked the coal-tar soap, which he got free from the pit, in the airing cupboard until it was rock hard. It lathered like a stone in your hands). But this was different - soft, and fluffy, embracing, and left my hands feeling soft and fragrant.

On holidays to my glamourous Aunty Glad's house in Gayton, the scent of her bathroom, with its Lux and Camay soaps and little ladies in crinolines to hide the bog roll, was an earthly delight to me. I bought myself Norfolk Lavender perfume on trips into Norwich, and revelled in it, quickly followed by cheap-as-chips Jovan Musk, still made by Coty, and which I probably smelled of from the age of 11 to the age of 20. 

The slippery slope, clearly, though it's taken me a long time to really start sliding down it - something very common, I'm told, in young women who came of age in the era of the big heavies - Poison, Opium, Samsara, Giorgio - but who couldn't bear the olfactive reek of those big aromachemicals. Personally I retreated into the world of soliflores like Yardley's English Lavender and Jasmine from Culpeper (sadly no longer with us), or 4711 Cologne. 

So, for me, as once it was for the world of wine, the world of perfume is an unexplored territory,  which I must say I am having great fun charting. I got my first Diptyque fragrance recently, and a stack of Etat Libre d'Orange samples is on its way from an Ebay friend. 

I will report back from the frontiers...

Lately, I'm becoming something of a perfume fanatic, but since only have a small budget, I have been buying from various resellers on Ebay. This way, I can get part-used bottles, small sample bottles, discontinued fragrances, etc. But yesterday I noticed something very strange - you can't buy luxury LVMH-owned perfume brands on Ebay if you live in France.

There's not a single Dior, Givenchy or Guerlain fragrance (or, for that matter, beauty product) listed on Ebay.fr, though you can get LVMH's lower-priced brands such as Fendi and Kenzo. There are masses of Diors, Givenchys and Guerlains listed on Ebay.co.uk, and Ebay.com, but when I bid on them from France - even if the seller permits overseas bidding - my bid is blocked 'pour raisons judiciares'. 

Interesting.

I would have thought this amounted to restriction of trade, though doubtless the companies concerned would claim it's an anti-counterfeiting measure (it is a criminal offence to buy or own a counterfeit object in France, so even by having it, you're breaking the law). But why assume that all vendors are counterfeiters? And why would this only apply to the luxury end of the brand spectrum? And why only LVMH-owned brands? I can, for instance, buy niche luxury brands such as Serge Lutens and Annick Goutal perfectly easily on line, so I assume this is not a government matter.  

Anyway, I find it annoying, really, when all I'm trying to get is a little 5ml sample of each perfume, and it leaves me thrown back on firms like The Perfumed Court, and having to pay for postage from the US, as I am obviously not about to drop 100 euros on a large bottle of perfume which I then find I don't like after all.

However - I have also found a way around it, for anyone who needs to do the same. It's (obviously) not allowed by Ebay, and you have to trust the vendor, but just ask them to list an item that doesn't exist, with a buy-it-now price, and you buy that and they send you the real thing instead. Yes, it's a risk, but for a 10-quid sample bottle of fragrance, no great loss if you do get shafted - though if you do, it's a simple case of caveat emptor. 

I really fear for women's sanity sometimes, you know. I've always enjoyed reading Liz Jones' column in the Daily Mail - although I disagree with virtually everything she says. But her latest 'reveal' is that she's had a facelift. At 52.

Well, it's her money, many might say. And it's her body - she can abuse it whatever way she wishes. But ye gods, what madness. 

Prior to her facelift, Liz looked like a pretty normal woman of her age - a bit tired, maybe, but nothing that 'a good shag and a sleep' wouldn't fix (along with switching from the dead-black hair colour and eyebrow pencil, love - no-one over 35 can carry that off).

Now, she looks like a Stepford Wife - her face a creepy, espressionless mask that reveals nothing of the life she's lived.

The standfirst rightly says: "Liz Jones, 51, has always hated the way she looks, particularly as she got older..."

"Always hated the way she looks"? Well, that says it all, really. Because no woman who truly valued herself would willingly go under the surgeon's knife without some horrible, over-riding reason. 

I find it particularly shocking that the article's intro is so positive about what she has done (all the more so because this woman has outlined in terrifying detail her absurd spendthriffery and the colossal amount of debt she's in etc). Phrases like: "line-free glory", "impressive results" and "brave" are very much telling the reader what to think. 

Well, I beg to differ. Being line-free is not glorious - God knows, we EARN our bloody lines. If Liz Jones looks tired at 52, well, DOH. Maybe she should cut down on her hours and do without the IT bag and the IT shoes. Cut out the booze. Do more exercise. If she wants to be brave, maybe she should help someone worse off than herself rather than spending money she hasn't got on beautifying herself, which is anyway only shoring up an old building that will eventually sink on its foundations, as we all do. Brave is a word we should use for the armed forces, not for this.

I know, I know - at root it's insecurity, not vanity. Liz Jones' main problem, I always feel, is that she's a woman who hasn't come to terms with looking normal when she's surrounded by women who are abnormally beautiful and paid to be so (bearing in mind that beauty, of course, is a cultural phenomenon and part of the zeitgeist - many of today's models would have been considered positively ugly in any other time but our own). 

Being surrounded by the 'beautiful' people would make anyone feel insecure, and quite likely short, fat and ugly. But this is where you have work to gain some perspective and build your inner character. I feel Liz Jones has never done this. What she's done instead is buy into every cliché that is thrown at women, and that women seem to fall for, as if we hadn't had 100 years of free education.Go abroad, for heaven's sake; learn a language; learn a skill; expand your mind - the thing that makes you a human being.

Women need to resist this pressure to look constantly YOUNG - it is, after all, a hiding to nothing. And there really is pressure to come up to some standard ideal. OF COURSE Liz's surgeon suggested a facelift - what on earth does she think he makes the most money out of?

My friend H visited a Harley Street surgeon in order to have a mole removed, and the bastard had the cheek to say: "Oh, I think we should fix that nose first...". H, btw, is a slender 29-year-old with the porcelain beauty of a Dresden shepherdess, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with her nose. But even, despite her  she was rattled - no woman retains total confidence about her looks. 

I notice, too, that Liz Jones mentions that she didn't tell her boyfriend what she was about to do in case he dissuaded her. Another Gawd 'elp us, because men, bless 'em, do often actually love us for who we are and don't want to see us go through the kind of pain and blood loss that a serious assault from a mugger might involve just so we can live up to some imaginary standard of beauty. 

Oh well, I could rant on, but will stop here. What now for Liz? Further in debt and still ageing (like the rest of us). When it all catches up with her again, what will she do?

And just to remind us all that you can look fantastic over 50, WITH your wrinkles, here's Lauren Hutton: happy, smiling, engaged, vibrant...

I watched a programme last night that I found very disturbing - Bums, boobs and botox - about the cosmetic surgery company Transform.

Transform is apparently a large, well-known company in the UK, which offers surgical and non-surgical procedures, including tummy tucks, botox, restylane and all the rest of the modern paraphenalia without which people seem unable to live. 

What I found most distasteful about this company was its hard-sell tactics both on the phone and in introductory evenings, where - like a revivalist meeting - people are pulled along by the group atmosphere. There was also the fact that it offers procedures to its own staff at half price. The end result of this was that they all looked like aliens - immobile mouths, immobile foreheads, weird, staring eyes where blepharoplasty had been performed, huge plump cheeks like hamsters that hadn't swallowed their food.

The man administering the botox - an Australian former dentist - looked the most freakish of all those involved, with his wild eyes and terrifying frozen expression. Why on earth do people DO this? They all look like they've had a stroke. And one of his patients, Magoo, very worryingly did not realise that botox was a recurring procedure until just before the needle went in. Surely he should have been given a cooling-off period?

The saddest thing of all was that most patients were very pleased with the result of their procedures. It is frightening that this look is becoming 'normal' in the UK and that people are so willing to pump themselves full of drugs and chemical compounds whose long-term effects remain unknown, in the name of beauty, which - surely to God - really comes primarily from other things: vivacity, engagement, kindness...

I fully admit that there are some procedures that looked useful - particularly the tummy tuck on the man who had lost 10 stone in weight and found himself hanging and saggy. Wanting the removal of this loose skin when you have made so much effort to lose weight strikes me as understandable, though I do also know women who've opted to just hold it in with a light control garment. And microdermbrasion is a surface procedure that can scarcely do any harm - though a word to the young man who was having it: change your fucking job if you want to look less tired!

It was particularly striking that patients themselves were insecure rather than vain, and I feel that companies like this prey on this insecurity. You could see it most clearly in the men, especially a young Polish man who couldn't find a girlfriend - he imagined - because of his premature baldness (believe me, baldness never held back a confident man), and one older man who had made the mistake of marrying a woman half his age and now felt the need to have a hair transplant. He is, I imagine, also in the market for other nonsense such as Viagra. 

Seventy per cent (yes, sisters, count it!) of the company's money comes from breast augmentation. How sick are women if we feel our attractiveness is seated in our breasts? And how terrible that we are willing to have our tender flesh cut about with a surgeon's scalpel and plastic inserted inside our bodies to come up to some fake idea of what a woman should be? I find this whole business unspeakable. 

Anyway - a frightening programme that is well worth watching if it's ever repeated or you can catch it online.