LOOK around your bathroom and count up the number of lotions and potions on its shelves to help you look younger/smoother/'less tired' - yes that really is how cosmetics giants are selling their stuff to men, these days.

Then add up how much they all cost. The figure we spend on grooming and looking acceptable to the rest of society is positively shameful.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse - 'bras' for primary school girls, a form of botulism injected into our wrinkes, men so terrified by their own back hair putting off women that they spend a fortune on waxing - think again.

There is a new 'beauty treatment' in town which should be straight out of the salon in True Blood's Bon Temps.

Vampire Therapy involves a patient's own blood being injected into their face to plump up the skin, reduce wrinkles and make someone seem younger than their real years. Allegedly.

I couldn't help thinking about all those 17th century medical devices for 'bleeding' patients when I read this story.

Those peddling the 'treatment' claim it lasts up to a year and say doesn't have the face-freezing side-effects of Botox.

Every treatment has its poster girl, and this one is claiming Angelina Jolie.

That's Ms Jolie who used to wear a necklace made from a vial of her former husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood around her neck.

Of course the really interesting part of this story is that it costs £500 a time.

It really is impressive how voracious capitalism is set on relieving us of our cash. Ours is a system which encourages us to buy obscene amounts of food at seemingly knock-down prices (BOGOF is most supermarkets' marketing tool of choice), and when we eat it, to relieve us of our money with gym memberships, exercise videos, slimming groups, therapy for food disorders, food replacement shakes and self-help books.

Then when we feel rubbish it tells us we look rubbish and we should buy moisturiser made from platinum shavings to look ten years younger (OK that's an exaggeration, but you see where I'm going with this).

Heaven forfend one might actually look one's age and think about other things - like how vicious circles such as this one prevent us asking awkward questions about who has most of the world's money and what they are doing with it.

In the 1980s there was a band called Pop Will Eat Itself. Seems prescient now that we have become the Country Which Ate Itself, doesn't it?