I GOT a real shock when I looked in the bathroom mirror the other day and didn’t quite recognise the person staring back.

It looked like me but a bit older. If I’d had an older sister, I could have sworn it was her.

But I don’t and, yes, it was me.

However, after a quick wash, a bracing walk with the dog and a bit of make-up I began to look more like my old self.

Or should I say older self.

At 41, I am reaching the stage in my life when girly talk will almost always end with “I am thinking of getting a bit of work done.”

And by “work” they don’t mean the hard slog most of us are used to.

No, the talk is of fillers, Botox and a smoothing-out of the wrinkles.

Or, to coin a phrase which must have entered the Oxford English Book of Phrases by now, “non-surgical procedures”.

Now I may well be vain but when it comes to parting with hard-earned cash I want value for money and I certainly don’t do pain.

It may be the Coward’s Guide to Growing Old Gracefully but then why do I want to turn the clock back ten years?

Of course, if I had a magic wand I wouldn’t mind being 25 again and looking like Mischa Barton but looking like me at 25, forget it. Been there done that and quite frankly I am a little (well, OK, a lot) older and wiser.

I will just have to settle for the best I can be at 41 and 51 and, God willing, 81.

Hopefully, there will be more laughter lines than frown lines but then life is a lottery and ageing is a fact of it.

Which is why I was shocked to read that 415,000 women a year in the UK are spending £5,000 a time on such procedures.

Women like Julie Stepney, of the Isolagen Support Group, who thought £3,500 and 144 injections was a small price to pay to turn the clock back.

It was a small price for the six directors of Isolagen Inc, the US parent company, who earned a cool £1.24bn after selling their shares in the company that has now ceased trading in the UK.

Isolagen, it was claimed, was the latest wonder procedure, sometimes referred to as the “grow your own facelift” treatment in which a patient’s cells were harvested and injected back into the face. It was claimed the procedure could smooth out frown lines and wrinkles.

What the company failed to reveal was that, following complaints in the US, where a success rate of just 7% was reported, Isolagen was withdrawn in 1999.

Nevertheless, three years later, it was introduced to the UK amid much hype in 2002, before being withdrawn in 2006.

The Support Group, backed by the Consumer Group Which? claims UK patients were being treated as “guinea pigs”. Due to a legal grey area and a weak regulatory system, it meant the product was largely unproven and unregulated.

It would be a cheap shot to criticise these women who confess their self esteem depends on their looks or lack of them. Or to question how women in the UK manage to find £2bn to spend on these injectable procedures when thousands are dying in the Third World for the price of a clean syringe.

In my view, it goes much deeper. The people we really need answers from are the people who are supposed to protect us. The Government and lawyers who are failing to produce satisfactory legislation to cover these procedures. They are hardly new.

But most worrying of all are the people who are prepared to peddle those false dreams.

In many cases, non-surgical procedures such as Isolagen can only be administered by the people we should be able to trust – the medical profession, including doctors.

Two years before my 40th birthday, I confessed to a woman I had just met that I was dreading my big birthday. She grabbed my arm and beckoned me to follow her to her “clinic”, where she produced a glossy wad of brochures about a new “miracle” procedure which would transform my life.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, it was called Isolagen.

But what you probably didn’t know was this woman was, and still is, a practising GP in the NHS.

And she is not alone.

Before we start blaming the victims for their only too-human failings, we should be re-examining the status of those who have signed The Hippocratic Oath.

Or should that be “The Hypocriticial Oath”?

* VALERIE HILL returns next week