How I fixed my 62-year-old wrinkly neck in just 15 minutes WITHOUT surgery: It’s one of the hardest areas to treat particularly if you lose weight. Now there’s a game-changing answer… and I’m proof it works

Our faces are lies and our necks are truth, is how writer Nora Ephron, then 65, described the plight of the well-groomed woman who, despite her best efforts to maintain a youthful appearance, finds that the crepey skin on her neck gives the game away.

Ephron concluded: ‘Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck.’ I wonder then what Ephron would have made of the clever new non-surgical treatment I tried called MCT (meta cell technology) with exosomes to firm up my neck and jawline?

It was only in my late 30s that I realised I should have been slathering my neck as well as my face with skincare and sunscreen. And today, in spite of all the fancy skincare I use, occasional lasering, radiofrequency, ultrasound, microneedling and injections of ‘salmon-sperm’ polynucleotides – all of which have helped – at 62, my neck is getting a bit loose.

The skin on our necks is thinner than that on our faces and has precious few oil glands to keep itself juicy and hydrated. We also give it a hard time: it’s constantly being stretched as we twist our heads and lift our chins, and we rarely think to treat it to a dash of the serum we’re using on our face, let alone protect it from the sun. Necklines and jowls, or ‘turkey necks’, are among the top ageing concerns for women in the UK, right up there with eye bags and crow’s feet.

Twenty years ago, there wasn’t much you could do for your neck short of a pricey and invasive surgical neck lift with weeks of downtime, but now there’s a whole raft of options, including the injectables and lasers that I’ve tried.

Cosmetic doctors tell me that ‘tech neck’ – the endless crinkling of neck skin from staring down at our devices – has only heightened anxiety about how our necks look. Many users of the weight-loss jabs Wegovy and Mounjaro also find that losing fat can leave looser skin around the jawline, once the padding beneath has melted away. So any procedure offering improvement to this dreaded skin ‘laxity’ is catnip to the tweakment-curious.

I pitched up at Dr Sophie Shotter’s Harley Street consulting room to find out what this MCT-and-all-the-rest treatment is, and whether it could work its magic for me.

You’ve probably heard of PRP, which stands for platelet-rich plasma – otherwise known as a ‘vampire facial’. A PRP injection involves taking a vial of blood from your arm and spinning it in a centrifuge for five minutes, so that the red blood cells fall to the bottom of the vial, leaving a clear golden plasma at the top. This liquid gold – the PRP – is full of substances such as growth factors and exosomes that can help regenerate the skin. Wherever it is injected – the face, the hands, the neck – should see a boost in tone, texture and tightness.

‘Regenerative’ treatments like PRP, which use substances derived from your own body to improve the skin, such as blood or fat, are popular with people who don’t want anything foreign, like filler or polynucleotides, injected into them. But the older you get, the less potent your own plasma is as a skin-reviver, so it wouldn’t normally be my first choice of treatment.

This is where MCT comes in. It’s a machine the size of a desktop printer and sits neatly alongside the centrifuge in Dr Shotter’s Harley Street consulting room. While the 15ml sample of blood she has just extracted from my arm is being spun into golden plasma, she explains how it works.

Kim and Kourtney Kardashian and Megan Fox are reportedly fans and, like PRP, it is done via a course of injections that take less than 15 minutes to complete, with no surgery required.

‘The MCT device uses heat and light to amplify the effects of PRP,’ Dr Shotter explains. ‘So it gives it more potential for regeneration.’

One setting can triple the number of growth factors in the plasma, while another stimulates the platelets to release huge numbers of exosomes – around 300 billion per ml of solution. That’s an impressive number, and far higher than the off-the-shelf exosomes found in cosmetic clinics, which typically contain between 1 and 50 billion exosomes per ml.

Exosomes are microscopic vesicles, or bubbles, that transport different cargoes – such as growth factors or genetic instructions – from one cell to another. When ageing cells send out distress signals, exosomes bring help. In this case, they’re going to encourage my tired old skin cells to make more collagen and elastin and tighten up, so the more of them I’m getting, the better.

As well as tackling crepey necks, Dr Shotter is using this supercharged PRP to improve skin texture and treat thinning hair. ‘It’s great for fine lines, especially around the eyes where it can improve skin density and brighten the area,’ she says.

Dr Shotter uses a syringe to draw the golden plasma out of the vial and carefully injects it into a ‘cassette’ – a slim, credit card-sized flask that slots into the MCT machine. She presses a few buttons and it whirs away for ten minutes, working its magic. Once that’s done, it’s ready for injection.

Using a very fine needle, Dr Sophie injects the precious super-plasma all over my neck and up over the edge of my jawline. I’m glad I didn’t wave away the numbing cream.

The injections may be tiny, but each is like a little bee sting and there are a lot of them – I stopped counting after the first 50. Neck skin never enjoys this sort of treatment, and mine is very red and dotted with tiny raised ‘blebs’ where the product has been injected. I know they’ll be gone by the end of the day, but for the first few hours it’s not a great look, so I wrap a soft silky scarf around my neck for the journey home.

How does this compare to surgery? There’s no comparison. This is a swift, non-surgical injectable treatment that can improve your skin quality – and with that, make your skin a bit tighter over time. But it’s not an instant fix and it’s not cheap at £1,050 a session. A surgical neck lift would cost easily 10 times that and would remove excess skin and show a much more dramatic and lasting result – though you’d need to be prepared for a few weeks of downtime.

With the MCT plasma tweak, I need two more treatments, each a month apart. I can’t tell if anything is changing at first but, by the third session, Dr Shotter peers closely at the skin under my jaw and pinches it thoughtfully.

‘It’s definitely tighter,’ she says. A few weeks later I return for an ‘after’ photo using the Aura imaging device in Dr Shotter’s clinic – an extraordinary piece of technology which, with a single snap, creates an exact 3D ‘digital twin’ of your face and neck. 

When Dr Shotter loads my before-and-after twins side by side and rotates them to compare their profiles, we can both see the difference. My jawline is definitely tighter, and, joy of joys, there’s a clear contraction in that sloppy bit of skin under my chin. 

The results should last for six to eight months after which I’ll need another maintenance treatment. I think Nora would be impressed by that.