I wash my face with avocado and honey, and moisturise with angelica

Feeding your face is usually a pejorative expression, referring to a person's greed. Perhaps it has a second meaning and applies to beauty, too. If beauty comes from within, a balanced diet provides all the nourishment your skin needs. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, plus plenty of water, and soulful radiance will be yours.

Beauty, the skincare gurus tell us, is also a matter of the outside; only skin-deep. At all costs we must prevent wrinkles, or at least try to smooth them out. Dutifully, most women - and nowadays many men, too - slap on moisturiser. Our great-grandmothers may have rinsed their faces in dew, but they probably followed this up with a slather of emollient grease. Old recipe books tell you how to mix your own, and these so-called natural ointments are back in fashion, imparting a virtuous glow to the complexion for those who have the time to stir saucepans of melting beeswax infused with rose petals collected at dawn. For many years, I have anointed myself with Nivea Creme. I buy it in France, where it still comes in the old-fashioned round, flat tins. These are so pleasing to the eye that I collect my empties and am building an Arte Povera stack of them on the bathroom shelf. Nivea was good enough for my mother when she was younger. It's good enough for me, too.

Creams are all much the same, I always thought. Read the small print on the bottom of the tub: water (called "aqua" for some reason), liquid paraffin, perfume. Why pay out a small fortune for posher packaging? We all know the answer to that: insecurity, fear of ageing, fear of loss of love, fear of death. No one has yet invented a cream that prevents death. Jesus may have loved having his feet massaged and anointed by Mary Magdalene, dipping her fingers into her pot of costly ointment, but he did not give her the credit for his resurrection, as far as we know.

Enter my niece, that wise woman coming from the East End, laden with gifts. Cosmetics that she insists I will enjoy. With a single wave of her mascara wand, she has transformed me into a guinea pig. Sceptical, but grateful for her kindness, I am trying out a range of products developed by Daniele Ryman and sold in Boots. These eschew "chemical preparations" and "synthetic perfumes" in favour of natural substances. They certainly feel and smell delicious. Back to those fruit and veg. I am feeding my face with an anti-ageing serum based on blackcurrant seed oil, borage seed oil, passion-fruit seed oil, baobab seed oil, carrot oil and evening primrose oil. After this, I apply a moisturiser made from angelica. I wash my face with avocado and honey. I caress my hands with a cream composed of tamarind extract, avocado oil, mango butter, sesame seed oil and mulberry extract. I'm beginning to feel like a character in the Song of Songs.

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