A few years back, I lost a significant amount of weight. It came off entirely by accident following a major unforeseen life crisis that resulted in a prolonged reduction of appetite. Almost overnight I went from being a healthy average-sized middle-aged woman to a thin one. Everyone was very complimentary, of course. But this was in 2022, back when shedding weight still seemed like an accomplishment and evidence of restraint rather than something to be bought and administered via needle and private prescription. I waited for my dress size to rebound to an eight from a four as it had in the past but this time round, for whatever reason, it did not.

Skinny might well look better in jeans than deep-fried Camembert tastes, but here’s a harsh truth: thinness isn’t kind to the middle-aged female face. And it wasn’t just my face that suffered from lack of plumpness in the post-collagen and human growth hormone-producing season of my life. I missed being a wee bit fat in certain obvious places I will leave to the imagination. I missed the curve of my hips and calves and upper arms and earlobes. Skinny in my late forties, even my feet and hands looked gaunt and tired.

I finally began to understand that old French chestnut about women of a certain age being forced to choose between her arse or her face. And why the very richest women in America have ended up looking the way they do: skeletal but also now selectively cushioned in strange sculpted lumps and bumps, injected with fillers of every conceivable sort, and some you wouldn’t want to conceive. For the first time in history the deleterious attendant aesthetic downsides of extreme thinness are a problem money and technology can – and will – solve. Even if it means harvesting the flesh of the dead. Let me explain, if you can stomach it.

The fat tissue is harvested from frozen cadavers then sterilized,preserved and stored in test tubes

The fat tissue is harvested from frozen cadavers then sterilized,preserved and stored in test tubes

The fashion for extreme thinness isn’t new. For decades, since the rise of fast, cheap food, since the poor got fat, near-anorexia has been a way of signaling that you’re ultra elite. Tom Wolfe described it best in The Bonfire of the Vanities: “The women came in two varieties. First there were women in their late thirties and in their forties and older (women ‘of a certain age’), all of them skin and bones (starved to near perfection). To compensate for the concupiscence missing from their juiceless ribs and atrophied backsides, they turned to the dress designers. This season........

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