We meet to talk about Lulu’s Secrets to Looking Good, a book in which the perennial celebrity passes on everything she knows (and she knows a lot) about skincare, wardrobe, exercise, diet and inner wellbeing. Uplifting and inspiring, the book, which is being serialised in YOU today, is a bible for any woman who wants, like Lulu, to look and feel her best whatever her age.
‘What is so wonderful is that we are living in an era when women can look and feel good for a lifetime. We are living longer, we are living more healthily, science is more advanced; and as a result my generation has the chance to be ageless. It would never have occurred to my mother that she could write a book or start a business at 60; now women can do whatever they like, be whoever they want,’ she says with a smile (a smile, she points out in one of her tips in her book, is an ‘instant face-lift’).
If Lulu has had real cosmetic surgery she’s not saying, and it’s certainly not showing (close up she doesn’t have that ‘alien’ look, and there are a few laughter lines round her wide blue eyes).
I agree with what Madonna once said: “I am not against cosmetic surgery; I am against talking about it.” I mean, I have done the Botox thing – been there, done that, got the T-shirt. I am not into doing that any more. But who am I to say to anyone else, “Don’t do this, don’t do that”? Live and let live, I say. Being judgmental is very ageing,’ she says with a laugh.
But then looking good, as Lulu is quick to point out, isn’t about looking young. Indeed, the last thing that Lulu wants to do is turn back the clock to her own youth. Not just because she is happier in her own skin these days but also because, when you examine archive pictures of her from the 1960s (particularly YouTube footage of her on Ready Steady Go! in 1965), she looks so much more attractive in 2010. Nor is she keen on the idea of being able to turn back the biological clock.