WHAT price beauty? That is a challenging question, particularly when a tub of face cream (anti-wrinkle, of course) can cost upwards of £30 a pop.

Add in cleanser, moisturiser, eye cream, night cream, the latest dewy-skin-promising serum – then tip out the contents of your average woman’s make-up bag – and you can see why the beauty industry rakes in millions of our hard-earned cash each year.

I love make-up; it is truly is a gal’s best friend – it covers up your trouble spots and accentuates your best bits (and you don’t have to listen to it for hours when it breaks up with the boyfriend).

But there has to be a limit on how far women will go in the pursuit of looking good.

Cosmetic treatments have soared in recent years – almost becoming the norm, as women pop out for a bout of Botox or a jab of collagen in their lunch hour.

If the rise of the “facelift in your lunch-hour” horrifies you, then what about the notion of the “revenge surgery”? This is where newly-divorced women book themselves in for a boob job or a tummy tuck in order to make their ex-partners jealous. Apparently, this is on the rise. Transform, one of Britain’s largest cosmetic surgery groups, reports that recent divorcees make up a quarter of its business – a year-on-year increase of 62 per cent. Britons are spending in excess of £180 million a year on cosmetic surgery – and the figure keeps on growing.

Which begs the question: how far would you go to stay young-looking?

I was shocked to learn from a girlfriend last week that she’d had Botox and was planning a second treatment because its effect were wearing off and she was starting to look “cross again” between her eyes.

I winced as she told me this story. Personally, I’m happy to smear my body with lotions and potions, but injecting anything would be going too far.

But as anyone who has looked at their face without make-up on, cosmetics, in any shape of form, are addictive. If you think you look better with three coats of mascara, then you will always wear three coats of mascara. Ditto if your lips look fuller after an injection of collagen, then why stop?

Well, a good reason might be the case of 20-year-old Claudia Adusei from London, who died earlier this month after having silicon injected in her buttocks to give her a “booty lift”. Claudia had the treatment in America, but things can go wrong here too. Businesswoman Penny Johnson is suing her plastic surgeon for £54 million after a facelift at a clinic in Leeds left her, according to her lawyers, with “uncontrollable facial movement, pain around the right eye and grimacing”.

Men have suffered for their vanity too. Quite what footballer John Carew thought when someone pointed out the tattoo on his neck “Ma Vie, Mes Regles” translated not as the intended “My Life, My Rules,” but “My Life, My Periods” on account of a rogue accent.

These are cautionary tales indeed, but are they enough for us to escape our modern-day Dorian Gray curse?

Channel 4’s Beauty And The Beast may be a crass title for a TV show, but it does hold an interesting mirror to our increasingly narcissistic culture. Each week, it takes someone obsessed with their image and gets them to spend a week with someone with a facial deformity. The results are often surprising – revealing it is the vain young woman rather than the scarred-for-life burns or cancer victim who needs most help in coming to terms with how they look. The excess hair and make-up or addiction to cosmetic surgery is often a cover up for deep insecurities and lack of self-esteem.

However gimmicky the show, it does make you pause for thought and take a long, hard look in the mirror – and be thankful for what you see.