A headline in The London Standard last month caught my eye. It read: ‘Are you ready to get your glow …with a salmon sperm facial?’ Quite a shocker, I think you’ll agree. I mean, where on earth is the adjectival hyphen?

On to other matters, because this stuff really is all the rage. The story related how famous names such as Jennifer Aniston (her photo is on the home page) and Kim Kardashian have opted to have this skincare treatment. To give the molecule its proper name, that would be polydeoxyribonucleotide, or PDRN to its friends. Its use originated in South Korea and it is now one of the most popular skin-enhancing lotions in the world. And, as the headline said, it comes from salmon sperm.

Now I know I ought to apologise for the appalling pun in the previous sentence, but I won’t because in a fabulous column in The Times over 18 months ago, Caitlin Moran went magnificently overboard. She told how Aniston had informed the Wall Street Journal in October 2023 that as an anti-ageing boost she had had salmon sperm injected into her face. She explained to the WSJ: “I said,’ Are you serious? How do you get a salmon’s sperm?'” Moran wrote that this “shows that, even 20 years after Friends finished, Aniston still instinctively talks in feed lines that are begging to be paid off by Chandler shouting ‘Take it for a date and see what happens next’…after this media onslaught , of course, the genie was out of the bottle – or, indeed, the sperm out of the salmon”.

Moran had a lot more fun with this – suggesting there might be a “new CEO of the previously moribund Salmon Sperm Marketing Board” – but clearly it’s a serious matter for anyone who is eager to enhance their looks or the quality of their skin. Perhaps the more so given, that after all that, Aniston apparently didn’t feel any better for the experience. However, Dr Jennifer Owens of the Glow Clinic told The London Standard: “What makes PDRN stand out is its regenerative approach and flexibility. It can even be used in delicate areas, such as under the eyes.” One in the eye there for the sceptics, I guess?

Furthermore, a facial aesthetician named Keren Bartov enthused that at her Notting Hill clinic, PDRN was now the most-requested treatment. Astonishing stuff but, hey, at least the adjectival hyphen survived the chop this time.