Am I the only one to delight in Kate Moss's wear and tear?

Moss's modelling career began when she was just 15, with a set of pictures for The Face. So she has been at it now for an awfully long time, this looking-lovely malarkey.

But because she started so young, and specialised in the waifish rather than the lumpy, she has always seemed supernaturally immune not just to time itself but even to the wear and tear inflicted by her apparent enthusiasm for all kinds of refreshments - not to mention her strong commitment to smoking cigarettes, and her alleged penchant for going out of an evening in search of a little amusement, rather than for the quiet night in, finishing off the ironing while sipping a herbal tea.

Immune no longer. Her birthday pictures are startling. While it would be going a little too far to say that they are reminiscent of the moment in vampire films when the sunlight strikes, or the climax of She, when Ayesha ill-advisedly steps into the pillar of fire for a second time after everything has gone so smoothly for the past 2,000 years, they do not do her any favours. The lips seem distressed, the nose swollen, the wrinkles spreading, the skin blotchy and loose, the neck tendons standing out.

Superhero though she has always seemed, she is going the way of all flesh. She is on the Brigitte Bardot trail. Having also begun her career as a sex-pot teenager, Bardot quit films just before her 40th birthday and has since led a lifestyle that has left her looking quite a sight, not so much like an older version of herself, as the spitting image of WH Auden in drag - the elderly Auden, of whom it was said that it looked as though somebody had been chopping wood on his face. Or, as he himself put it, resembling a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain, a sentiment that comes to us all in due course, if not usually so well expressed.

Will Kate follow Brigitte all the way to the full Auden? She doesn't seem the retiring type but it would be as sad as seeing a beaten boxer keep returning to the ring to see her lose it completely in public.

It would make her just one more victim of the thorough-going conspiracy that drives the fashion and beauty industry: the pretence that there is such a thing as ageless beauty, transferable and purchasable through a garment or a pot of cream, when what is actually being sold is always youth itself, which cannot be bought. And, until now, Kate Moss has not been a victim of that universal and pitiful delusion, she's been a great exploiter of it. Time's up, perhaps.