“You simply can’t have long hair after thirty-five,” my friend Margot announced the other day – checking herself a moment too late as she remembered the long ponytail snaking down my 36-year-old back. I thought about poking her in the eye with the business end of a spatula, but relented, given that Margot was merely voicing one of the myriad rules of engagement that emerge in the fashion battle once you’ve hit thirty.  

You can hear them in the back of your mind, a litany of directives that never once cropped up in your twenties: Never attempt hot-pants. Keep your mid-riff to yourself. Ditto your lingerie. Dangly earrings will make you look like Pat Butcher, not Chloe Sevigny. Treat Vogue as an amusing loo-book, not as a bible… 

But chief among these, and so often overlooked, is the edict to reconsider your upper arms. That unassuming zone, which until now has meekly gone about the duty of joining your shoulder to your elbow, suddenly turns on you when you turn thirty-three. Bingo wings arrive overnight, like DHL parcels. And suddenly entire swathes of your wardrobe are obsolete: the dinky tops, the tiny tees, the boob tubes, bra tops, camisoles and vests. 

Some of us, of course, are more likely to go bingo than others. My fate, alas, is written in my genes, thanks to an Italian grandmother whose upper arms would swing jazzily in the breeze at summer picnics. I remember being hugged by those warm flannels of flesh, a place that smelled of security and lavender water and a peppermint lost in a handbag. Which is all very well if you’re seventy-nine and have trouble remembering where you put your teeth. At thirty-six, when you’re still considering a trip to Ibiza and have long glossy hair and good ankles, well, slack triceps are nothing but a trial and a tribulation.  

So what to do? I asked my friend Ginny at the Gym, a woman who knows the gluteus maximus inside out and can probably retrieve dropped peanuts with one flex of her pelvic floor. Her advice was simple, though brutal. “Lose a few pounds,” she said, “and your arms will tighten up automatically. Concentrate on cardio-vascular calorie-burning exercise. Once they’re leaner, you can start weight training for tone.” 

Great. Why is it that all roads lead to the Stairmaster these days? Pleasingly, there is an alternative for those of us who wish to attain Madonna-style chicken-drumstick arms: plastic surgery. The increasingly popular procedure is called brachioplasty, and entails a sweeping incision from armpit to elbow, followed by uplift, suturing and swaddling. More than 10,000 people underwent the operation in the States last year, enduring a hefty bill and several weeks without the use of their arms.  

Armed, so to speak, with this information, I can report that brachioplasty is way down my list of exterior improvements. After much rumination, my solution is a simple one: I shall grow my hair even longer, and wear it loose, disguising my arms beneath its lush canopy in the manner of Lady Godiva. That should really get up Margot’s nose. Which for my money is a little on the large side.

Published You Magazine, October 10 2004