Will botox stand the test of time?

M any fashions have come and gone since I started being paid to pay attention to such things.

I look back fondly at the days I wrote endlessly about boho chic or investigated the best grandad cardigans to wear over your boyfriend's jeans.

Ponchos, Pucci print tunics, pussy bow blouses? I have written about them all.

Some things are barely in fashion before disappearing again, while others defy all the odds and stand the test of time.

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And it was while I was recently watching The Housewives of Orange County (I know, it is my guiltiest pleasure – please don't judge me) I realised there is one trend still with us I would never have predicted to withstand the vagaries of fashion.

The wives, you see, were at a "treatment party", which, at one time, would have consisted of a few bored housewives putting some Virgin Vie products to good use.

But the days of such simple pleasures are long gone.

Treatment parties these days consist of women watching – unsipped calorific Champagne in hand – as their friends have the latest batch of botulism injected into their foreheads.

And it is not just in the rarified atmosphere of the OC these parties happen, either.

I have friends who have attended such events in Hull, which, with the best will in the world, can hardly claim to be keeping up with the millionaire jet-set most of the time.

Back when I was a young fashion cub, I remember covering an event by a salon that was one of the first in the area to offer so-called non-invasive "rejuvenating" treatments.

Very kindly, they organised a demon- stration and all us journos gathered round in horror as someone stuck very large needles into a middle-aged lady's face as she grimaced and pretended it didn't hurt at all.

We were then given a chance to sample the product ourselves which, to a woman, I think, we shrank back from en masse.

Usually journalists only move at that speed when the free drinks trays come out. I returned to the office and wrote a, no doubt, pithily amusing comment on the crazy fad I had just witnessed.

Fast-forward 12 or so years, however, and botox and fillers are now so common- place as to be almost unremarkable.

In fact, even your full-on invasive plastic surgery is barely a subject of gossip any more.

Most B-listers are happy to talk to any passing magazine about their new boobs or the liposuction that went wrong, of course. But in the past few years, it seems like more and more average girls on the street are also electing to change the size and shape of what they were born with.

Like so many of the trends we look back on in horror – neon, nylon tracksuits anyone? – I do wonder if we will one day laugh at the era where women injected themselves with poison so that their faces did not move. Or will the fashion just grow and grow until women of a certain age who don't have shiny stretched skin and eyebrows that arch almost up to their hairline will be the odd ones out?

If there is one thing I have learned in this game it is that long-term fashion forecasts are the hardest.

Back when I watched that demonstration I was pretty sure no one would want to do that to their face.

I guess we may soon be wearing those neon nylon tracksuits again after all.