How to get perfect skin like celebrities

There's no such thing any longer as dry, oily or combination skin. We are all dehydrated because of our exposure to chemicals and preservatives and the medication we take. Our lifestyle is completely different from 50, 60 years ago. As soon as you take an aspirin, you're dehydrated. If you're on the pill or antibiotics, you're dehydrated.

My approach is not to deal with skin types but skin problems. If you have dryness and oiliness and ageing, you can put three different products on top of one another, which in days gone by would have been contradictory.

When people tell me a client looks flawless, I say, "You don't see her in real life with no make-up on." I know what they look like close up, and it's not perfect. A lot of the younger ones like Sienna (Miller) smoke, drink and are on and off planes. They need me more than before, because we live in a different world.

Many of my clients are airbrushed in pictures. There are only a handful of people with flawless skin I know, including actress Rosamund Pike and model Claudia Schiffer. Their skin is what you see in the photo. Rosamund is an English rose, her skin is dewy, moist — perfect.

My clients do tell me their problems, whether with work or a partner, and we've got several divorces going on at the moment — we hear about it all.

Even though mine is a small salon, when people come in here I like to think they feel safe, that they are going to relax, even though we don't do the big pamper thing — we are more result-based treatments.

But no matter who the client is, they have to come to me. I was asked to go to the Palace to do Camilla (Parker Bowles) before she got married but I refused. You can't take everything out of the salon. I said I would do it in the middle of the night or six o clock in the morning on a Sunday. I only broke my rule once — to do Madonna's eyebrows for her wedding and I'd never do it again.

As my clients get older, I tell them to wait for a facelift rather than injecting everything. I particularly don't like heavy fillers — they damage tissue, cause broken capillaries and you end up with blue veins. If you damage cells, it's like somebody punching you.

Our obsession with youth and the need to stop the ageing process is sad because, if you have a problem in your twenties and thirties looking in the mirror and seeing what's there, how will you deal with it when you're 60 or 70?

But not everyone is like that. I'm trying to get Judi Dench in because her daughter's coming. I think her generation feels that going to a facialist is frivolous. She's a serious actress. If you go to the Hollywood side, it's different, it's as though they're desperate to keep their youth, whereas our serious actresses think of their craft, not their youth remaining.

I started the salon on nothing. I had nowhere to live. So I sent off for as many credit cards as I could. Now, I've got money in the bank. I don't have a credit card any more. The only thing I've got is my own flat, so if anything went wrong I've still got a home.

I don't think of my celebrity clients as different from me, they're just people. A lot of them are in awe of other celebrities and they think they aren't good enough. It's the pressure of looking perfect; you're on a rollercoaster; once you're on it, how can you just let everything go?
Linda Meredith, 36 Beauchamp Place, SW3 (020 7225 2755, www.lindameredith.com)

Interview by Sharon Feinstein

Linda Meredith on her celebrity clients:
Sienna Miller
"She didn't have a skin routine before she came to me and she knows that the ageing process starts when you are in your mid-twenties. Jude and Sienna are my youngest couple clients."

Madonna
"She came to me for years before she went to Dr Brandt. Now her face has collapsed. Instead of having a facelift, she's had fillers in her face. It makes big cheeks and the bottom half of the face is completely different, the angle's wrong. She hasn't had a facelift, she's had implants."

Colin Firth
"His wife, Livia, brought him in. He's comfortable with me now — he thinks I'm a schoolmistress — but in the beginning he was pretty embarrassed. Colin told me to make him look as good as possible, for as long as possible."

Lily Allen
"Kate Moss sent her to me. Lily needed something doing with her eyebrows. She was doing a photo-shoot and I just said, while you're here, why don't I do a facial too, because Lily didn't do them often and she's hooked now. She's very different in real life; quiet, unless she's frightened of me as well."