Before Botox was a household name, Death Becomes Her had anti-ageing all tied up. A topless 71 year-old gives you a shot of youth elixir and BOOM, you’ve got perfect skin and tits like rocks. Forever. It came with a strong moral message too – grow old gracefully or you’ll end up smashing into a hundred little pieces – but that threat aside, there are some pretty interesting pearls of beauty wisdom to be gleaned from this 1992 film about staying young and beautiful. Most of which are entertainingly ludicrous. 

Here, we’ve gathered the 16 most absurd for your delectation…

1.    Always match your eye shadow to your glitzy sequins

Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep) is a second rate actress with first rate billing on Broadway. More than a bad review, what she fears most of all is growing old. Her look is straight from the diva’s glamour cheat sheet – icy blonde hair, a killer figure and long, beautifully manicured Barbra Streisand fingernails, painted in glossy red polish (a key distraction from wrinkles and/or facelift scars). Check out those vertiginous lashes and young-person’s turquoise eyeshadow, which incidentally matches her leotard. How old is Madeline? Nobody knows.

2.     Bad brows are the key signifier of an existential crisis 

Madeline’s childhood friend, the frumpy-dumpy Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) is in the audience with her fiancé, revered plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis). Poor Hel, her appearance is movie-land code for dowdy. It’s as if the page boy cut has outgrown her funny little head, and like every pre-makeover character of 90s teen movies, her eyebrows are a mess. Hollywood is teaching us all a lesson: she’s soon committed into a lunatic asylum, where she obsesses over the blonde with the immaculate grooming.

3.    Grow your hair out to cover the scars

Backstage, Madeline wields her gold eyelash curlers (Shu Uemura, surely?) and applies red satin lip liner to the tune of ‘Wrinkled Wrinkled, little Star, Hope They Never See The Scars…’ A flop of blonde hair falling over one eye, Madeline works Veronica Lake realness to lure away poor old Helen’s fiancé. With her cheekbones and his licence to nip and tuck, it’s a match made in cosmetic procedural heaven. 

4.    Sleep in an upright position, you know, to stop the sagging

Flash forward 14 years to Madeline, in her Beverly Hills bedroom and we are treated to every anti-ageing trick of the 1990s as she wakes: the neck sling to halt gravity’s pull on the jowls. And are those…Frownies – those sticky paper patches to prevent any life-ruining facial expressions from happening overnight. A neck pillow holds her upright, a safe distance from possible pillow-creases, and a pair of white cotton gloves aid absorption of handcream. A de-puffing gel eye mask arrives with her breakfast of yoghurt, apple and tea. None of it’s working. She goes to a medi-spa to beg for a ‘plasma separation’ procedure, scoffs at a ‘collagen buff’ and finally trashes the joint. ‘Makeup does nothing anymore!’ she cries! It’s time for something else. Something beyond the laws of nature.

5.    Revenge is best served via the disarmament of a glossy red lip

Helen has written a book - ‘Forever Young’ - and at the book’s launch party, Hel and Mad will meet for the first time in 14 years. Really this is all about Helen’s Big Reveal. They say, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But doesn’t she wear it well, that Hel? The transformation is jaw-dropping. Every ounce of fat is gone, and in its place are a whole lot of Bambi lashes, almost indecently glossy red lips, long square acrylics (also red) and a mass of auburn waves stolen from Jessica Rabbit. THAT’S how you do a makeover, people. 

6.    Seek out a topless anti-ageing shaman for salvation

Shown up by a dazzling Hel and then ditched by her toy-boy lover, Mad remembers the mysterious Lisle Von Ruhman and goes to seek her help. Lisle has employed some sort of black magic to achieve her quite-frankly remarkable looks; the shiny Louise Brooks bob, the red lips, the alabaster skin, the strong brow – she is the ultimate poster girl for eternal youth. She is 71. The actress who played Lisle, Isabella Rossellini, was also the face of Lancôme at the time, but really, this is the contract to end all contracts - eternal youth looks really, really good on her. 

7.    Drink a pretty pink potion and you’ll never grow a day older

Lisle proffers a shiny pink elixir capable of ‘stopping the ageing process dead in its tracks’, she hisses. And when the alternative is presented to you in no uncertain terms - ‘Don’t drink it and continue to watch yourself rot…’ – what do you do? You drink it, of course, as does Madeliene whilst Lisle sinisterly chants ‘SEMPRE VIVRE! LIVE FOREVER!’ (cue scary thunderbolt noise). 

8.    Live in the now. Shoulder the consequences later

That little bottle hiding within what looks like a Faberge Egg promises to deliver Madeleine what she desires more than anything – eternal youth. What Lisle isn’t awfully clear on is the immortality bit – maybe it was there in the small print, but Madeline was duly blinded by the bright lights of high tits and an un-furrowed brow ahead. It’s all over in minutes - no awkward post-treatment chat, no after-care leaflet, no free samples to take away? She didn’t even cleanse first.

9.    Lose the dodgy scrunchies and velour tracksuit

The shower puff style scrunchies Mad has been wearing in nearly every scene have disappeared, this is second only to the potion at instantly stripping the years off her. Either way, without a single nip, tuck or Botox-mimicking super serum, Mad’s skin tightens, her cheekbones lift and her hair goes all thick and lustrous. Then her butt cheeks jump up like two coconuts being hoisted into a hammock, followed by both breasts. But she’s still in that turquoise velour tracksuit, so the best, presumably, is yet to come. 

10.    Violate every natural law. All of them

Back at home, Mad and Ernest argue, he pushes her down the stairs and all that invasive surgery and ‘plasma separation’ comes to nothing - she’s dead. Thanks to her voodoo potion though, there’s not a scratch on her (or so it seems). Hey, even Botox can’t protect you from a fall. The local ER doctor doesn’t agree and she’s trucked off to the morgue where Ernest finds her, tucked up in a body bag, looking divine (an early precursor to Frotox, maybe - sticking your head in a morgue equals flawless skin.) Turns out, purple is as flattering as red to the slightly-older-post-potion mouth. A berry lip and violet eyeliner on chalky dead skin – well, it’s kind of fierce. 

11.    Consider spray paint in your modern anti-ageing armoury

Luckily, Ernest gave up plastic surgery to become a mortician, so who better to patch up his dead-ish wife? We know from Ernest that regular makeup just doesn’t work on dead chicks, though. Their pores are ‘too dry’. First, embalm with formaldehyde then use a combination of spray paint (airbrushing for the deceased) and mannequin paint. Come on, it’s not that much of a stretch from bee venom and snail trails, is it?

12.    Contour like a Kardashian, while pretending you don’t contour like a Kardashian

Madeline’s BACK, bitch. She performs an extreme lipoplasty on Helen with a shotgun. But LOOK at those cheekbones, because before Kim Kardashian had even dabbled with bronzer, Madeline Ashton was doing the 90s version of contouring – a triangle of rouge smashed underneath her very ample cheekbones. And if you can look away from that shapely flush for just a moment, have you clocked the pink frosted lipstick? It is the absolute lynchpin of 90s deathly glamour. 

13.    Shed the pounds by blowing them off with a shotgun

Put down the aloe vera juice, forget the Soul Cycle classes – just bulldoze a whacking great hole through your stomach and you’ll never look bloated again. All in the name of beauty.

14.    Wear wacking great swathes of lipstick - frosted or glossy - at all times

So, what I’m getting here is, the more dead you are, the more makeup you should wear. And the bigger your hair should be. No recently deceased beauty worth her weight in formaldehyde is going to be caught dead without her lipstick on. Ditto the hair; keep it neatly coiffed, no matter what life-threatening pickle you find yourself in.

15.    Make sure you have someone around who can paint your ass and ensure it sits behind you

Ernest makes a hasty retreat from his two ill-fated beauties, leaving them to face an eternity spent plastering up each other’s asses. With peach-coloured spray paint. Astoundingly, not a single spa has ass-painting on their treatment menu, yet. We checked. Sort of.

16.    Always remember to watch your step and protect that beautiful face of yours

Flash forward another 37 years and Ernest has died a happy man. Mad and Hel though, well, they are not so lucky. Peeling skin like over-cooked salmon, frazzled hair and brittle bodies, these two haven’t been taking their cod liver oil. So, eternal youth really is an impossible dream, then? Ultimately, the message is don’t mess around with Mother Nature. She can be an even bigger bitch than Mad and Hel.