What should I do about my face falling down?

How’s your face? Mine is collapsing.

Like a balloon that’s slowly letting out air, my face is falling down. It’s not some terrible disease or genetic misfortune, it’s just age.

Just age. That’s me trying to minimise the fact that on each side of my mouth, little pouches of slackness are happening. Have already happened.

My face is falling down. Lines are happening above my mouth, a smoker’s delta into which tributaries of red lipstick run (I don’t smoke).

Frown lines, formerly present only during frowning, have taken up permanent residence; Resting Bitch Face is the new normal.

So what can be done? It’s necks that used to bother Nora Ephron — although she’s dead now, so they probably don’t anymore.

In her essay ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’, she wrote:

You can put makeup on your face and dye on your hair, you can shoot collagen and Botox and Restylane into your wrinkles and creases, but short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck.

Yes there is. You can put a scarf on. Or a polo neck.

But unless you get an actual niqab, there’s not much you can do about a collapsing face, other than face it.

An acquaintance, someone who used to spend a lot of time in front of the camera — which I realise makes her sound like a retired porn star — insists that a facelift is the best solution, but only if you look like you haven’t had one.

I briefly consider this option after receiving a payout from botched medical surgery, but there’s nothing like botched medical surgery to put you off signing up for more surgery, no matter how cosmetic.

Anyway, I’m not that vain. Am I? Are you?

Is the Bikini Industrial Complex — a term coined by authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski to denote the billion-dollar cluster of industries which exist to tell women we don’t look good enough — finally sucking me in?

Is my falling-down face my achilles heel?

I find myself in front of the mirror, finger tips touching the skin by my ears.

The tiniest pull and my face is no longer collapsing; a bit more pressure, and I am in a Joan Rivers wind tunnel.

Dear God. Maybe I am that vain.

After years of cheerful fatness and self-confident self-acceptance, maybe it’s the falling down collagen which will be my downfall.

Because even though I’ve always thought of boob jobs as expensive self-harm, I’m beginning to wonder if getting your face hoicked up isn’t more of the same.

No, says another friend who has also had a facelift, it’s bloody marvellous. (She was married to a surgeon at the time, so it was free).

She loves it when people mistake her best friend, who is the same age, for her mother.

The best friend doesn’t love this, but prefers to spend her money on travel.

She says it makes for better anecdotes.

She’s right, of course.

I just wish my face would stop falling down.