Would YOU inject collagen from dead horses into your face to look younger? Betty does and insists it’s better than Botox. But some doctors are worried – and animal lovers are outraged

The company that has launched the treatment, called Nithya, into more than 85 salons around Britain, insists it’s going to be the biggest thing since Botox.

Yet at the same time, isn’t Nithya also disturbing evidence of how much we are prepared to turn a blind eye to ethics in our increasingly desperate attempts to hold back the years?

Betty, who underwent a course of injections over six months last year at a cost of £1,200, still claims to be ‘an animal person’, saying she had no second thoughts about the treatment because the horses ‘don’t suffer’.

‘At my age, a lady always likes to look younger. I don’t worry about it because I’d rather have this than Botox [a purified protein made from lab-grown bacteria] because this is natural.’

Of course, it rather depends on how you define ‘natural’.

Nithya claims to work by stimulating the growth of collagen — the building blocks or scaffolding that holds skin together from the inside.

Other collagen-stimulating products on the market use polylactic acid, made from plants, or spheres of calcium.