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.

I was watching Professor Regan's pharmacy last night, having followed this series with some interest.

For those who don't know, Prof Regan is a scientist who takes issue with products that make scientific claims that they can't back up. Last night's programme threw up some interesting issues about ageing. 

Although Prof Regan didn't deny that fillers such as Restylane are very effective and do exactly what they say on the tin - fill in wrinkles - she also discovered that is is not necessarily your wrinkles that actually age you. 

She did this by going to a face recognition centre, where she was asked to guess the ages of numerous faces flashed up in front of her. They went past at high speed - in fact, said the scientist conducting the experiment, most of us can 'age' someone in around a tenth of a second (talk about first impressions....). 

Prof Regan guessed ages correctly within 2.8 years, and this is apparently typical. But what was interesting was that she could do this - as we all can - EVEN WHEN THE IMAGES WERE BLURRED. In the blurred pictures, wrinkles weren't visible so clearly, we must all of us judge age on more than wrinkles alone. 

He then showed her that there were two kinds of images - some had shown the full face, with hair and ears, while some had been close-cropped vignettes, showing only the centre part of the face, with no hair visible. With the vignette images, her accuracy rate had dropped to 3.8 years. 

Judging from this that hair might be more important than wrinkles in terms of guessing someone's age, Prof Regan then did another experiment. She took a variety of mothers and daughters and got them to swap hairstyles, with the help of some wig artists who duplicated the looks that the women were wearing. No other changes were made to clothes or makeup, and groups of subjects were then asked to guess the women's age.

Overall, the subjects put the daughters (now wearing their mothers' hairstyles) at three years older than their real age, and the mothers (now wearing their daughters' hairstyles) at four years younger than their real age.

The message of this is fairly simple - if you want to knock a few years off, get to a hairdresser, which is is a crumb of comfort for those of us who don't want, or can't afford, to go down the injectables route.