Why this emphasis on the “before” and “after” in makeovers? More rarely spoken of is what happens after the “after” – the aftermath of the “after”, if you like, from which place I write to you now. It is a week since I returned from New York, but three or four years from my return to normality, that is to say such a time when my hair grows back to its silvery-birch grey and stops resembling a wig.

A word about “before”. I know, you’re looking at the “after” picture and thinking, the camera never lies (I have a ton of make-up on, remember). And it is factually correct to say that before I went to New York I was in several ways the physical encapsulation of the American nightmare. True, I was not fat. True, my teeth, if not polystyrene white, were a tolerable shade of cream. But my hair was a matted bird’s nest of tortoiseshell and grey. It clashed unsettlingly with the mahogany arcs of what could have arguably been described as a mono-brow. My hands were unmoisturised claws. The feet I won’t bother to depict here except to say that a speck of pink varnish still clung to one toe, a memento of a happy time on a beach (Turkey, in June). But, Tad, in Britain I do not leave the house thinking that’ll give them a scare. I leave the house caught between three very British anxieties: 1. Will these heels get caught in the Times House air-conditioning vents? (Answer: yes. Some moron had them installed in the floor. Better a pair of flat shoes than a broken ankle.) 2. Will my look weather the transport system? (Answer: no. Stuff the blowdry. And the hairbrush for that matter.) 3. How can I both dress for work and embrace what fashion journalists calls “effortless style”? (Answer: make no effort. Looking as though you have made an effort in London requires long disclaimers to friends and colleagues as to why you have chosen to “dress up”.) Truth be told, I really didn’t have a problem with my face. But the Americans did. The Americans had a field day with my face.

I had $350 (£175) to spend – but far exceeded it. What on? I deferred to two New Yorkers. “You’ll be looked down on in this city if you haven’t had at least a manicure and eyebrow wax,” said Sari.

“You have crazy bag-lady’s hair,” said Roger. “Do you snack from trash cans?”

Roger is 34. He has a 22-year-old girlfriend, whom he’s specifically asked me to flag up in this article – the 12-year age gap is somewhat of a status symbol in Manhattan. Roger described to me the revulsion he felt when he once stroked a British girl’s thigh and found it covered in soft down. It is his opinion that the Brazilian wax is the best thing to have happened to the US as the American pudenda now more closely resembles what he’s used to down-loading on his computer. “Even Christopher Hitchens has had his balls waxed,” said Roger. His eyes swivelled back to my head: “Jesus, your hair. Can’t you wear a scarf?”

The preliminary accounts added up like this: leg and bikini wax, $40; eyebrows, $35; manicure, $9; pedicure, $15; massage, $60; cut, $100; colour, $80. Plus tips.

Leg wax, manicure and pedicure were straightforward enough. You leave your hotel, wherever you are in Manhattan, and within five seconds you stumble across a day spa or divey manicure bar or shop front done up much like a carwash is in the UK, outside of which huge neon lettering demands that you: “Get Your Micro-dermabrasion Here, $30”. In New York the number of manicurists has doubled in a decade. The number of registered waxers has shot up from 431 to 3,301 since 2000. Are they salons, a minority of New Yorkers want to know, or are they sweatshops?

Whatever they were, I wasn’t going to have my face sandpapered off by a vengeful underpaid aesthetician. I had more pressing things to deal with, such as the manicure I’d just botched. Christ, it’s boring watching varnish dry. I feared a public dressing down from the angry Korean woman who’d spent 15 minutes sculpting my nails. Already she’d summed up my hair situation with the words: “Your face not match.”

I got a message from Sari: “You need a Brazilian. There is only one place in New York to have a Brazilian.” European Nails by Lucy wasn’t one of them and thus began my descent into flagrant looks-oriented overspending. When I arrived at New York’s most famous waxing salon, the J Sisters, to have my manicure cured ($45) and my bikini line tended ($65), my pleas for leniency were ignored by Janea, the woman who takes credit for having invented the Brazilian. Janea reminisced about the year she decided “to go a little farther, from the lips down to the butt” because “New York women work all day – when they come home, they smell”.

I tried to retain my mask of journalistic impartially as Janea first smeared wax on then played a violent game of tug-of-war with my crotch. “Gynaecologists,” I dimly remember her saying through this excrutiating torture, “send their clients to us.” As she forced my left leg behind my head and I screamed for mercy Janea said that she had a hunch that The Hitch would be back any day to retouch his perineum.

The beauty fascist she was, Janea left me with an apt token of her work: nothing below but a Hitler moustache. When she was done she observed her work. “Now,” she said proudly, “you can have sex.”

“There are only two places in New York to get your eyebrows waxed,” wrote Sari. “Mean Christine’s” was one of them. Christine Chin is eyebrow technician to the stars. Her fee is $35, but I figured it was worth it, with the pound being so strong. Mean Christine’s assistant gazed at my left eyebrow and said: “This one is more perfect. I like this one better.” I asked her how long it would be before that one was perfect too. “Six months to a year,” she said. “Both your eyebrows so different.”

Mean Christine also does facials. They cost $350. In my defence let me just say that it is hard to leave a salon in which there are framed pictures of Rachel Weisz and Gisele Bündchen on the walls inscribed with notes that read: “Thanks for making me beautiful. Giselle xxx.” It is even more difficult if Mean Christine appears and says: “I’ll take five years off you. Let’s make it ten.” Impossible, when she homes in at close range and says: “Your face is very lumpy.” (Her nickname derives from her reputation for brutal frankness.)

So I spent $350 on a facial. Big deal. Contextually, it was a bargain. What’s £172.20 in New York when Mean Christine thinks she’ll charge £1,000 a facial when she comes to London? And, honestly, it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to my face. True to her word, Christine has “cleaned out all of that gunk”. The catch is that I have to go back in two weeks. Which’ll come to another $350 plus the flight cost. That made me so tense I booked in for a massage. It cost only $60 so, what the hell, I booked myself in for a couple more. For two days my tour of New York had taken in no museums, art galleries or shops, but the interiors of three beauty salons and two massage parlours. I read only beauty magazines and learnt about concepts such as “scalp acne” and the possibility that my eyelashes “are ageing.” I read an ad that claimed: “Swabbing with Nozin Nasal Sanitizer wards off airborne germs.”

My face was clearer, my fingernails more experimentally colourful, my personality partially eroded by 48 hours of salon talk.

I could have left it at that. For the aesthetically carefree among you, a warning. In New York, these people who fix your looks have their own ideas about what constitutes female loveliness (usually it’s Reese Witherspoon in slingbacks and a lemon shift dress). Do not, as I did, arrive jet lagged in a hair salon and utter the words: “Just make me look better.”

First they low-lighted the precious grey in my hair. It’s at this point I had my “after” picture taken. Then they told me the low-lights were irreversible as bleach turns white hair blue. Then they said the only way to fix this is to dye the whole thing “a warm brown”. I came back to London with vermillion toes, salsa nails and coffin-coloured hair. I’d spent more than $700 and intend to spend a few hundred more on correcting the mop. Before I left Roger said: “Your skin is great. And now you have the hair of a Hasidic Jew, only their wigs are usually better cut.”

In a nutshell: yes, the beauty treatments are dirt cheap in America. The pound is so strong that you can mani-pedi yourself into a happy stupor there without having to sell your house as you would do here. The massage joints I will desperately miss. But there’s an upside to not being able to afford the primping, I say, and more salient questions to be asked than: “Is it true that you can have your testicles waxed in New York for a laughable £2.17?” And the most salient question of all is this: will three days of cheap beauty treatments make you look any better when you get back? Tad would say yes. But I quote what my local newsagent, Harry, said to me today: “I liked you when you were natural.”

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