The Age – March 2nd 2009 (Becky Barker, Shelly Horton, Angie Kelly, Louise Hall, Sarah Maguire)

When you are a filler first-timer you sure need thick skin. You show up with some minor tweaks in mind and before long you’ve had a whole bunch of flaws pointed out that you didn’t know were there. Filler injections aren’t new but having a local anaesthetic added into it is.

Cosmetic Nurse Ginelle Kelly didn’t hold back on the fact that she thought I could do with a bucket-load of the stuff. I opted to have a small amount in the folds that arc from my nose down to my mouth, plus a couple of blobs in the hollow corners of my lips, which Ginelle said were “very ageing”. On a pain scale of one to 10, I’d rate the jabs somewhere between a two and three. So not too bad.

I could see right away that things were plumper and softer-looking where the lines had been a half-hour before and that the corners of my mouth had magically stopped drooping. Even though it felt a bit stiff, back at the office no one noticed anything. But the next day I woke up with a black and blue bruise about a centimetre long on my right cheek where a blood vessel had been nicked. People kept asking whether I had blue ink on my cheek. Despite this temporary annoyance, I can see this thing really taking off.