Turning back the hands of time through cosmetic surgery is a worrying new trend, says Helen Rumbelow

In the Royal Society in London hangs a portrait by Henry Moore of the Nobel prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin. Instead of her face, Moore decided to draw just her gnarled and knobbly hands, worn by 68 years of work, motherhood and life, saying that "after the head and the face, hands are the most expressive part of the human body". Three decades on, a cosmetic surgeon may glance at the picture and say: "That woman needs a hand-lift."

Modern culture revels in depicting the weathered hands of maturing women, but not in a good way. Out has gone the tenderness of Moore, replaced by the mocking viciousness of the tabloids and the gossip mags.

Sarah Jessica Parker's appearance at the recent premiere of her new film was celebrated in the British press with this headline: "Sarah Jessica Parker shows off her incredibly bony hands". Her acting, producing or entrepreneurial skills were forgotten in endless close-ups of a body part that inspired every Halloween adjective from "wizened" to "skeletal".

Next on the hit list is Madonna, who, despite a youthful face and body, has the hands of a 51-year-old. Which is not surprising, as she is 51. Her body is at two speeds: her hands ageing at a normal rate, her face and body at an arrested rate, and popular culture revels in pointing out the anomaly. "Wrinkled claw!" snarled the headline next to a photo of Madonna's knuckles in one UK newspaper.

The same treatment is meted out to Pamela Stephenson, Faye Dunaway, Teri Hatcher, Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz, and any woman in the public eye whose face is not deemed to match her fingers. For many celebrities their hands are now their portraits in the attic - suffering the ravages of time that their face is magically spared. Oscar Wilde said that a man's face is his autobiography, "a woman's face is her work of fiction". He might add, now, that a woman's hands are their brutal documentary.

So enter the rise in hand-lifts or, in cosmetic surgery jargon, "hand rejuvenation". Hands have long been the last frontier in anti-ageing surgery because of their technical difficulty, says plastic surgeon Patrick Mallucci. And this has given rise to the modern phenomenon of mis-matched hands and face.

"For women, hands are seen as a stigma of ageing. But you are limited in what you can do; unlike the face, you can't nip and tuck."

A "lift", when skin is stretched back and the scar hidden beneath the hairline, is impossible as it would disable the hand. Same with Botox. The problem with hands is different: fat loss. Babies are born with such plump mitts that you can hardly see their wrists. "But as you age, the skin thins and you lose fat underneath. You start to see the veins and the gullies where the tendons run," Mallucci says.

Or, as one tabloid said about Jolie's "skeletal" hands, they "have more bulging veins than Clint Eastwood". Slenderness, sun exposure and gym work-outs don't help, although these are the most common vices of the sort of woman who takes a lot of care over her appearance. And cosmetics, varnish or jewellery don't fool anyone.

The latest treatments focus on fattening the hand, either by injecting the woman's own fat from somewhere else, such as her thighs, or by mesotherapy - the injection of artificial fillers such as those used on the face. This treatment would need to be repeated every year or so.

But doctors working in the field admit it is a demand that has been led by the success of cosmetic treatments to the face. Professor Anthony Elliott, author of Making the Cut, says: "It was Karl Marx [who] noted that the expansionist logic of capitalism knows no limit; neither it seems does cosmetic surgery. If the face looked its age, the appearance of the hands would not jar. It is a good business model: by doing facial work, the industry builds in consumer desire for more."

But for those who resist the cult of youth, there is some regret to the increasing success of hand rejuvenation. Previously, a woman's hands were authentic, in a way that the duplicitous face was not. Now the "Frankenstein's monster" effect of traditional cosmetic surgery, with a mismatched assemblage of body parts, is being smoothed out. The prospect is of an octogenarian with a body perfectly passable as a 25-year-old, and no claw-like giveaways.

Vivian Diller, author of Face It: What Women Really Feel As Their Looks Change, says: "It's like when you get new furniture in your home, suddenly the carpets look old. Upgrade one part of your body, it highlights the age of the other. It is a slippery slope. Hand treatment begs the question: where does it stop? The ankle? The skin under your arm? Your whole body?"