To combat this, she has become a fan of a 200 pound-a-time treatment extracted from the eggs of Baerii sturgeon, reared on farms in the South of France. In sessions lasting up to three hours, Brad Pitt's other half is swaddled like a mummy to sweat out toxins before being smothered all over in the body cream. It promises to 'drench the skin with moisture and nourishment' and combat 'loss of firmness and slackened skin'.

Because of the high oil and protein content of caviar, it is thought to be especially moisturising. The fish smell is removed as extracts of caviar are used instead of whole roe. She has also been indulging in 90-minute facials using La Prairie's caviar-based creams.

Miss Jolie became a fan of the treatments earlier this year in Venice, after discovering them at the Hotel Cipriani's Casanova spa centre. Sir Mick Jagger, Gwyneth Paltrow, Stella McCartney and Kate Moss are also devotees of caviar facials, while Catherine Zeta Jones has been smearing the stuff on her hair to add instant gloss. The caviar-based creams are produced by extracting vitelline - or yolk sac - from the sturgeon eggs. The substance contains phospholipids, which are fats key to hydrating and softening the skin, as well as proteins said to contribute to the regeneration of skin cells.

Fig. had operated 15 offices in seven states that promoted a series of injections, at a cost of about $2,000 per body part, to reduce fat deposits on areas like the thighs and abdomen. The procedure, commonly referred to as lipodissolve, involves injections of drug compounds that have not been approved for cosmetic medical use by the Food and Drug Administration.

Since Fig., originally named Advanced LipoDissolve Center, opened its first office in 2005, its clinics performed more than 100,000 antifat treatments across the nation, the company said in an interview in September. In the last three years, 145 clients of Fig. have filed complaints to the Better Business Bureau of Greater St. Louis citing lack of results and adverse reactions, including pain and swelling. In the past week, 150 more consumers complained, said Christopher Thetford, a trade practice consultant at the Better Business Bureau. Mr. Thetford said his group hoped to help customers, who had to pay for the antifat shots up front, obtain refunds.

According to its Web site, Fig. will contact clients who had not completed their antifat sessions about continued treatment or refund claims. Attempts to contact the company met with a recorded message at its headquarters saying that Fig. was consulting with counsel and was likely to file for bankruptcy.

For the past few years, Dr. Howard Sobel, director of the Skin and Spa Dermatologic Cosmetic Surgery Center on 960 Park Avenue, has been quietly plumping up women's ears with injectable serums such as Restylane and Radiesse—the same ones he uses to rejuvenate their faces. "As people get older, the ear loses volume and shows wrinkle lines," said Dr. Sobel. "It's part of the aging process."

Dr. Sobel noted that if a woman is using fillers in her face to clean up things like naso-labial folds and forehead lines, making her face appear more youthful, then aging ears may stand out even more. Put another way, you want the handles to complement the vase—kind of like making sure your accessories match your outfit.

Though in this case, of course, accessories are precisely the problem. "One patient only wore big, heavy earrings, and part of the reason was that she was trying to cover her stretched-out ears!" Dr. Sobel said. "She didn't realize that the big earrings were only making the earlobe stretch more. When the hole gets too big it starts to pull the ear down. So we repaired the pierced hole in her ear and injected it, which added volume back, and it looked like her old ear." This is a common procedure, he added.

1. Revive Intensive Volumizing Serum - Price $600 per ounce
2. Sisley-Paris Sisleya Elixir - $390 for four 5 ml pumps or $582 per ounce
3. Cle de Peau Beaute La Creme - $475 per ounce
4. Dermagentics DNA Test and Custom Anti-Wrinkle Night Creme - $400 per ounce
5. Natura Bisse Inhibit-Dermafill - $385 per ounce
6. Kanebou Sensai Ex La Creme - $500 for 1.36 oz or $368
7. Dermalab Swissline Cell Shock 50% Pure Cellular Extract - $265 for eight 0.1 ounce pumps or $331 per ounce
8. Darphin Replenishing Anti-Wrinkle Serum - $310 for ten 0.1 ounce ampules or $310 per ounce
9. Valmont L'Elixir des Glaciers - $490 for 1.7 oz or $288 per ounce
10. N.V. Perricone M.D. Neuropeptide Facial Conformer - $570 for 2 oz or $285 per ounce
11. Orlane Hypnotherapy - $470 for 1.7 oz or $277 per ounce
12. AmorePacific Time Response Skin Renewal Creme - $400 for 1.7 oz or $235 per ounce
13. Guerlain Serenissima - $210 per ounce
14. Estee Lauder Re-Nutriv Ultimate Lifting Eye Creme - $100 per ounce

"It's been a challenging few years, being the age I am. Almost to the point where I felt like, well, they don't know what to do with me. I am not 20. Not 30," she revealed to Red magazine. "There aren't that many good roles for women over 40. A lot of them don't have much substance, other than being someone's mother or wife."

Demi's frustration with Hollywood's attitudes toward "women of a certain age" was evident throughout her interview with the publication. "If we are told we are not valuable once we hit 30, it is a problem," she said. "We all have more to give ... We can't just wait for something to happen. We have to say, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.'"

After a string of flops in the 1990s, she took a career break, during which time she met her current husband, 29-year-old Ashton Kutcher. Miss Moore then returned to the screen in 2003's Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, emerging from the sea in a skimpy bikini which showed off the results of a cosmetic surgery spending spree. As well as breast implants, collagen injections and liposuction on her hips, thighs and stomach, she had a £5,000 procedure to lift the sagging skin on her knees. She also employed an army of advisers - including a nutritionist, personal trainer, yoga teacher and kick-boxing coach.

Right now, most commercial sunscreens only screen out ultraviolet B (UVB), not UVA, which is associated with longer and more serious damage deep within the skin. Labels would have up to four stars indicating their effectiveness against UVA rays, the FDA said. Both UVA and UVB increase skin cancer risks and skin aging.

The new changes are undergoing a 90-day period of public comment before being published in a final draft form. According to the agency, those rules would only go into effect 18 months later, pushing the appearance of any new labeling to 2009 at the earliest. The agency has long been looking into making recommendations on UVA protection, Dr. Douglas C. Throckmorton, the deputy director of FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said during a mid-afternoon teleconference. Only now has the agency settled on which tests it will accept for rating UVA protection, he said.

"We believe this proposed regulation does, in fact, provide sunscreen labeling that clearly communicates information related to UV protection," Matthew R. Holman, from the FDA's Office of Nonprescription Products, said during the teleconference. Called "extra UVA protection," the new rating would be in addition to the SPF, or sun protection factor, already on sunscreens. SPF measures the effectiveness of the product in preventing sunburn from UVB rays.

UVB radiation causes sunburn, but UVA can damage skin tissue below the surface. "Both UVA and UVB cause skin cancer and aging such as wrinkles and sunspots," Holman said. "FDA considers both UVB and UVA radiation protection equally important at this time, because scientific data demonstrates that both have harmful effects on the skin," the agency said.

How did your relationship with your looks change when you turned 30?

For some reason, since I turned 30 this little crew comes in the middle of the night and they sew little sausages under my eyes! I found some great new eye patches that are so awesome. They're by Talika. They just take away the puffiness. You put them on for 20 minutes and they're genius.

Nearly 11 million cosmetic plastic surgery operations were performed in the United States in 2006, up by 7 percent from 2005, the group said. It also said more than 5.2 million reconstructive plastic surgery procedures were performed last year, mostly removal of tumors.

The most popular cosmetic choice was breast augmentation, with 329,000 reported in 2006. This is the first time "breast jobs" have passed nose reshaping surgery, performed on 307,000 people in 2006.

The group reported an 8 percent rise in minimally invasive cosmetic procedures such as injections to fill out wrinkles, with more than 9 million such operations. Botox treatments were by far the most common, with more than 4 million treatments in 2006.

Red-carpet dermatology involves scalpel-free procedures that create more temporary and potentially less detectable changes than a facelift, including Botox injections to paralyze the muscles underlying wrinkles, filler injections to pad lips and facial creases, or lasers for brown spots and broken blood vessels. These make possible the treatment of minutiae, like tiny crevices above or in the lips, about which actresses may fret more than civilians. And red-carpet dermatology permits entertainers with augmented faces to utter stock lines like, "I only had Botox" — a little white lie that allows them to obfuscate a veritable arsenal of beauty interventions.

"Celebrities can't afford to look like they have had something drastic done," said Dr. Jessica P. Wu, a dermatologist in Los Angeles. Dr. Wu said she has been working seven days a week for the last month ministering to actresses, agents and producers in her office and on movie sets, as well as making house calls. "But," she said, "they are coming in for smaller procedures because they know that every inch of skin they show on the red carpet from head to toe is going to be picked over."

Dr. Wu said an actor's grooming process might begin a month before an awards ceremony with Botox injections to the hands and armpits, treatments designed to reduce sweating. "Botox for excess perspiration is a must-have for the red carpet, for actresses so they don't stain their dresses and for actors who don't want clammy handshakes," Dr. Wu said. She recommends that some celebrities undergo what she calls a "Botox neck lift" about two weeks before an awards show. This involves injecting the jaw line and neck to relax muscles underneath the skin, she said. "It temporarily gives you a sharper jaw line and a longer neck, which looks good if you are wearing a strapless gown or a low-cut dress," Dr. Wu explained. "And it's not likely to land the actress on the cover of In Touch with a headline like: 'Did She Have Surgery?'"

Using procedures pioneered by the hair loss industry for balding men, surgeons are using "plug and sew" techniques to give women long, sweeping lashes once achieved only by glued on extensions and thick lashings of mascara. And just like human hair -- for that is the origin -- these lashes just keep on growing.

"Longer, thicker lashes are an ubiquitous sign of beauty. Eyelash transplantation does for the eyes what breast augmentation does for the figure," said Dr Alan Bauman, a leading proponent of eyelash transplants. "This is a brand new procedure for the general public (and) it is going to explode," Bauman told Reuters during what was billed as the world's first live eyelash surgery workshop for about 40 surgeons from around the world.

Under the procedure, a small incision is made at the back of the scalp to remove 30 or 40 hair follicles which are carefully sewn one by one onto the patient's eyelids. Only light sedation and local anesthetics are used and the cost is around $3,000 an eye. The technique was first confined to patients who had suffered burns or congenital malformations of the eye. But word spread and about 80 percent are now done for cosmetic reasons.

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The surgery is not for everyone. The transplanted eyelashes grow just like head hair and need to be trimmed regularly and sometimes curled. Very curly head hair makes for eyelashes with too much kink.

Tests so far have been confined to mice, but researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children’s Hospital in Boston say the findings would mark a seismic shift in the biology of tanning if the cream was determined to be safe for humans. Unlike sunless tanning lotions that color the skin, the cream alters skin pigmentation much like a suntan. The more days it was applied, the darker the skin became. A heavy application over more than a week left some mice nearly black. The mice experienced no dangerous side effects, scientists said.

And researchers said the findings suggest people may be able to change their skin pigmentation to ward off skin cancers like melanoma, the world's fastest-growing cancer. "We just kind of smeared it on once a day, five days a week. Within a couple of days you could clearly see they were becoming darker," said David Fisher, director of the Melanoma Program at Dana-Farber and senior author of the study published in the journal Nature on Thursday. The cream "switched on the tanning machinery" in mice skin cells that were genetically designed to resemble those in blond and redheaded people, the study said.

People who tan easily, or have naturally dark skin, are far less likely to develop skin cancer than those with fair skin, the study said, a point which Fisher said underlined its potential significance in reducing cancer rates at a time when more fair-skinned people are living in sun-belts like the southern United States, Australia and the Middle East. In the United States, melanoma accounts for 62,000 new cases of cancer a year and nearly 8,000 deaths, according to the American Cancer Society. The molecule at the heart of the cream recreates a process that occurs naturally when ultraviolet sunlight strikes skin cells. The cells respond differently depending on a person's skin type. For people who tan well, the sun's ultraviolet rays initially harm DNA in the skin, but this is followed by a robust tanning that curbs the DNA damage.

For lousy tanners, even a light tan can inflict significant DNA damage that can lead to cancers like melanoma by causing pigment-making skin cells known as melanocytes to begin dividing rampantly. The researchers say a darkening in pigmentation can help these people reduce that risk. "Our strategy turns on pigment but doesn’t touch the DNA," said Fisher. "This actually may represent a broader strategy to prevent the damage that UV causes in the skin, shielding the skin in ways that traditional sunscreens cannot."

Yes, Miraval delivers a range of spa options, from the Arizona Aloe Wrap to the Zero Balancing body treatment. But it also offers the Equine Experience, in which guests work with specially selected horses to gain insight about themselves. Or the Golf Connection may appeal to others.

A small-scale pilot trial, published in the May 15 journal Dermatologic Surgery, found that Botox injected into frown lines around the mouth or in forehead furrows of 10 women eliminated depression symptoms in nine of them and reduced symptoms in the 10th.

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The study results fit with a large body of psychological research that has long shown that the mere act of smiling — even the most insincere "I don't want to pose for this photograph" smile — makes people feel better. Frowns make them feel worse. Volunteers asked to smile, for example, whether they wanted to or not, while watching a cartoon found it funnier than those not asked to smile, according to a 1989 study in the Annual Review of Psychology. Frown muscle activity, on the other hand, has been found to be a predictor of depression treatment outcome, according to a 1981 study in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

The finding fits too with certain treatment theories. Alcoholics Anonymous has a slogan, "Fake it till you make it," implying that acting as if you feel good actually helps you feel better. And cognitive therapy for depression often involves teaching people to cut the hangdog look. Botox's potential to treat depression dawned on Dr. Eric Finzi, a cosmetic surgeon in Chevy Chase, Md., and lead author of the study, a few years ago, while he was studying facial expressions. Also a painter, he was working on a series of portraits based on late 19th century photographs of patients confined in the French hospital La Salpêtrière, an institution for women "of abnormal constitution." "I went back and read Charles Darwin. Back in the 1870s, he brought up that you sort of are the emotions you express on your face," Finzi says.

Maybe, he thought, the facial muscles feed information to the emotion centers of the brain, which in turn respond with chemicals that produce happy or sad feelings. The loop is complete when those feelings are sent back to the brain, reinforcing expressions on the face. It's one theory that some researchers have held, though as yet there is no proof of such a neurological underpinning. Scientists have proven, however, that facial expressions can alter heart rate, skin temperature and blood volume.