Cellulite? Life is too short for body-brushing away the dimples

She spent years trying to remodel her thighs. Now Christine Manby has finally accepted she can’t just brush them into shape like a sculptor sanding away at a block of stone

Illustration by Tom Ford

Let’s talk about cellulite. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you haven’t got it – most likely because you’re a man – and I’m loathe to fill you in on the gory details lest you start seeing it everywhere and perhaps, at great risk to your own life, start pointing it out on the beach. If you have got it, then you’ve probably wondered how to get rid of it and possibly spent a small fortune in the process. As I have.

I’ve had cellulite for pretty much as long as I’ve had legs. I’ve had it since I was so young and skinny I could wear a wristwatch around my thigh. It kept me from wearing shorts as a teenager. I credit the magazines I read as a teen with a lot of good things – Just Seventeen in particular answered many of the questions I daren’t ask my parents – but the glossy cosmetic adverts that faced the uplifting content in Elle and Cosmo and Vogue also gave me a very unrealistic view of what my body should look like and how much I should be prepared to spend on making it perfect.

I splashed out on my first bottle of anti-cellulite gel when I was 21 years old. I’d travelled to the US for the first time and saw the magic potion featured in the duty-free magazine on the flight home. I scraped together every last cent I had in my purse to make what I saw as an important investment when the flight attendant brought round the duty-free trolley. The lotion was by a fancy French fashion house, more commonly known for its clothes, and at the dollar equivalent of £40 it cost more than I had hitherto spent on anything. Forty quid was certainly more than I would have spent on an item of clothing. It represented a third of my monthly rent at the time (I was living in an airing cupboard in Hackney).

But oh the promise in that plastic bottle! Smooth thighs as firm as the marble on the statues I’d seen at the Getty Museum. I was on my way back from Los Angeles, where I’d been visiting a friend who laughed at my knee-length (I’m not joking) bikini. This was way before retro-style ultra-modest swimwear was considered chic. How I wanted to be like those California girls playing volleyball in G-strings. When I got back to London, I started my new anti-cellulite regime before I even unpacked.

The lotion was pale pink and had the consistency of egg white. It contained caffeine and menthol and as I smoothed it on it made my skin feel tight and cold, reminding me of the “Deep Freeze” my rower boyfriend used on muscle sprains. That chilly sensation lasted for at least 20 minutes, convincing me that I’d been right to spend the money I should have been saving for the deposit on renting an actual room in a different flat. With an effect that pronounced, it had to be working. I could feel the fat melting away.

Except, of course, I couldn’t. Because, as my friend Jenny pointed out: “If any of these cosmetic treatments had an effect, they would be classified as medicine and only available on prescription.” By the time I got to the bottom of the bottle, I wished I’d saved my 40 quid. I had ruined a pair of dry-clean-only trousers by putting them on while the stuff was still drying, and I still had that dreaded “orange peel” look.

That early disappointment didn’t stop me trying every cellulite solution under the sun, both the lazy ones and the tough ones, over the next two decades. I rubbed in more cream. I’ve swallowed supplements that promised to strengthen my skin so that the fatty lumps would be smoothed out that way. Aged 35 I stood on a chair at an LA gym, wearing only my knickers, while a personal trainer prodded my saddle bags with a pencil and said I could be “thong ready” in six weeks. If I ate only tuna and slept on a treadmill...

I’ve had cellulite since I was so young and skinny I could wear a wristwatch around my thigh

Cellulite, for you lucky people who don’t have it, isn’t about eating too many pies. It’s the herniation of subcutaneous far within fibrous connective tissue and it’s all down to hormones. But I still was prepared, for a short while, to spend my days feeling slightly faint and smelling of fish in an effort to beat the bobbling.

A quarter of a century on, my head is no longer turned by the promise of smooth thighs in a bottle. But one thing nobody told me is that you can also get cellulite on your arms. As I hit my forties, suddenly the way every fashion commentator went nuts over Michelle Obama’s ability to rock a sleeveless dress made sense. After 45, great arms require great discipline.

I like getting my arms out. They made up for my pit-pony legs. So it was back to the war against dimples, anywhere other than in my face. A recent BBC documentary, The Truth About: Looking Good, pitted three methods of cellulite “control” against each other. Volunteers tried to reduce the cellulite on their thighs through the use of anti-cellulite cream, through exercise or through body brushing. Body brushing came out on top.

Body brushing involves stroking the skin (always in the direction of the heart) with a soft, dry brush. It’s been around for centuries. I first tried it in the noughties, when I read about it in a magazine. I still had the brush I bought back then in my bathroom cabinet, so when the BBC documentary suggested it might actually work, I dug it out. The theory behind body brushing is that it increases circulation, improves blood flow and stimulates the lymphatic system. Brushing my behind and my biceps, I could easily imagine I was brushing the bumps away.

Reader, of course I wasn’t able to brush my thighs into shape like a sculptor sanding away at a block of stone. I did, though, see an improvement in my skin tone after a couple of weeks and, perhaps if I did it often enough, I’d get the collateral benefit of muscle tone in my arms too. The unfortunate fact is that the promises of body brushing as a cure for cellulite are not really backed up by the science. Any visual difference in skin firmness is likely to be caused by the action of brushing causing the skin to swell, temporarily disguising the peaks and troughs.

Life is too short for body brushing – at least as far as I’m concerned. I’ll never be “thong ready” and it’s time I was past caring. If I’d looked more closely at those statues in the Getty Museum, I first saw as a 21-year-old (with a body I should have worn much more proudly) I would have seen that reproduction of Antonio Canova’s neoclassical Venus I’d so much admired was not stick-thin nor entirely without imperfection. She’s gently rounded and lightly dimpled and as Canova knew, she was all the more beautiful for it.