A WOMAN is walking slowly towards me, expertly wielding a cut-throat razor. We're in a small room three stories above street level, and the only exit is blocked by a solid-looking man dressed in black. What would James Bond do in a situation like this? Break out some nifty martial arts moves to disarm the woman before plunging the razor into the henchman's jugular? Or make a shaken-not-stirred exit by jumping out of the window onto the top of a passing lorry?
Fortunately, I don't have to make that decision. The woman holding the blade is Nicola Ferries of gentlemen's grooming company The Perfect Shave, and as part of an intensive four-hour makeover at Princes Square in Glasgow designed to transform me fro
m the scruffiest guy in the office into a suave secret agent, she's going to teach me how to shave properly. The guy by the door is Scotsman photographer and lifelong beard-wearer Donald Macleod, who is clearly revelling in my discomfort.
Before we start, Ferries recommends applying Pre-Shave Oil. Apparently this will protect my phisog while I go about the arduous task of removing my scraggly neck beard. "You'll read a lot of people in magazines advising you to exfoliate before you shave," she says, "but that's the worst thing you can do. When you exfoliate you take off a layer of skin, and when you shave you take off another layer, so if you do both together that causes redness." Would James Bond be able to save the world with a sore, red neck? Doubtful.
Before my run-in with Ferries and her razor, I pay a visit to the Sassoon Salon, where Senior Salon Director Maugè Michelle Clayton takes my unruly barnet and sculpts it into something that would pass muster at a high-end casino. Maugé has cut the hair of plenty of A-listers in her time – her favourite celebrity client was Julia Roberts. Everything goes smoothly until we get to the sideburns (not an issue for Julia, apparently) which provoke some debate. For his latest Bond outing in Quantum of Solace, Daniel Craig doesn't seem to have any. Clayton thinks I'd look silly with a "Full Craig" though, so after some umming and arring we end up compromising with little stumpy sideys.
With hair removal operations finally complete, it's off to for a facial with Space NK's James Reynolds. After an algae-based face pack, he dabs my coupon clean with little white cleansing pads. "Being guys, we tend not to bother with things like this," he says. Too right. It's hard to imagine any previous Bond – even arch-preener Roger Moore – stopping in the middle of a chase sequence to get his cleansing pads out.
Still, things are about to get a little more Bond-ish.
"We're now going to use Diamond Drops," says Reynolds. "This is a DNA shield." Wow – a DNA shield! Finally something that sounds like it might come in handy for a secret agent.
"It's a very light water-based serum," he adds. "It penetrates much deeper than moisturiser. It's not moisturising your skin, though, it's actually protecting your skin – it puts a barrier between the upper dermis and the lower dermis." Will it stop bullets? Alas no, but it will stop "free radicals and all the other nasties in the air" penetrating my skin, so I suppose it's better than nothing.
A Bond movie wouldn't really be a Bond movie if the hero didn't appear at least once wearing a sharp black suit. Ted Baker supplied the two-piece worn by Craig in Casino Royale – the Endurance Mk III. (In fact, a specially designed Ted Baker store was erected, fully merchandised, on the film's set in Prague, just so Craig could run through it.) I'm given an updated version of the MKIII suit, the MKIIIi, along with a white "Notta" shirt, a black tie and a slinky pair of Sorrel shoes. Add in a very nice pair of silver cufflinks (which don't contain either cyanide capsules or smoke bombs) and a £1,500 Driver Automatic watch, both from Links of London, and I'm ready to hit the roulette table. Or, er, the main concourse of Princes Square, where a passing toddler can be heard to ask: "Mummy, who's the idiot in the suit?"
