Getting Dressed

Getting Dressed Queen of camouflage

Mimi Adamson’s skin clinic is a godsend for burns victims brigid keenan

Mimi Adamson had lived more than half of her life when she discovered what she really wanted to do with it.

When she was growing up in New York, her very first ambition was to become a doctor. But that, in the fifties, proved impossible – girls rarely got into medical school.

Adamson decided instead on occupational therapy and studied at Columbia University School of Medicine, before moving to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago. There she met and married her husband and settled down to raise a family of four.

When her boys were at university, the tedium of suburban life in America, combined with a long-felt itch to travel – especially to Britain, which had always fascinated her – persuaded her to up sticks and live in London for a while. Her husband took her, their younger son and daughter to the airport. Later they divorced but have remained friends.

Adamson did various office jobs in London and, ten years later, she met and married the late Sir Campbell Adamson (1922-2000), former Director-General of the CBI and by then Chairman of Abbey National. ‘He was a wonderful man – he was intellectual and funny and played the piano well, he loved everyone and didn’t give a damn where they came from, and he was interested in everything.’

Lady Adamson doesn’t talk about age – ‘an unnecessary label’. Her eldest son, a neurosurgeon, lives in London, and she makes regular visits to Boston to see her daughter and other sons in America. That is where she stocks up on clothes – she is fond of the velvet jacket in our picture: ‘It’s like a really useful cardigan – you can put it over anything.’ For shoes she chooses Emma Hope: ‘They are comfortable, which is the most important thing.’ She broke her ankle not long ago and that has made walking difficult.

After working with camouflage make-up all day, Adamson herself uses a base she loves: Hyaluronic HydraFoundation, a range produced by Terry de Gunzburg, a former make-up artist and creative director of YSL. Her hair is cut and coloured by a hairdresser friend.

On a visit to Jersey with her husband, Adamson finally discovered her calling. They went to a lecture by a plastic surgeon on camouflage make-up. He explained how it was an essential tool for concealing disfigurements that plastic surgery could not deal with.

‘Something in me clicked,’ relates Adamson, ‘I suddenly knew that this was I wanted to do. After the talk, I went and talked to the surgeon, and he told me about the British Association of Skin Camouflage.’

The Association was set up by Joyce Allsworth, a WAAF officer during the war. Allsworth had been so shocked by the facial burns on a fellow airman that she became expert in camouflage make-up. She then worked with the Red Cross on training others and founded the British Association of Skin Camouflage.

After a course with the association, Adamson joined the Red Cross-trained team at King’s College Hospital, south London, and then moved to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where she has held a clinic for years. Her patients have had burns, dog bites, birthmarks, vitiligo and other pigmentation problems.

She says, ‘People are so vulnerable and so concerned when they have a disfigurement – 80 per cent of the treatment is the understanding and kindness you give. But they also need constructive advice. It is no use just saying, “You poor thing.” You have to give them real solutions.’

The first camouflage make-up was arguably invented by Max Factor, a Polish refugee, in the US in the 1920s. He actually coined the word ‘make-up’ and produced the Pan-Cake and Pan-Stik concealers, so beloved by Hollywood stars.

Things are far more sophisticated now. Adamson uses camouflage creams made by Dermablend and Covermark. She works with a palette of more than 150 shades. And the colour is waterproof – so it remains stable in the rain or when anyone wearing the cream is swimming. She proudly shows me extraordinary before-and-after pictures of her patients.

‘I get very emotional,’ she says. ‘This work is so rewarding. It changes people’s lives – it has changed my life.’

Left: Lady Adamson in December 2021. Jacket and scarf old favourites, trousers by Prada, shoes by Emma Hope. Above: With her daughter Hilary in the sixties

The Common Gull

by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd

Gulls test the ornithologist because of their seasonal and juvenile plumage changes. And they exercise the trophyseeking twitcher because five of the recorded UK dozen are rare visitors.

‘Seagull’ most aptly describes the kittiwake, which is oceanic in winter but breeds here in summer in greater numbers than any other gull. By contrast, all the other species are principally winter migrants. Only four of them are significant summer residents.

One of these is the common gull (Larus canus), which is indeed common but more of a birdwatcher’s bird than those urban scavengers the herring gulls, the black-headeds and the lesser black-backeds.

There are 50,000 resident common gulls in the British Isles, most of them in Scotland and north-west Ireland. That makes it the fifth-most numerous bird in the country. And in winter this figure soars to over 700,000, with the migration from Scandinavia and Siberia, promoting the common gull to thirdmost populous after black-headed and, marginally, herring gulls.

Telling it apart from these species can pose a problem until you see them side by side. A solitary common gull, white and grey and with yellow beak and legs, can be confused with the similarly coloured herring gull. But when they’re seen together, the herring’s bulk and formidable, red-flecked beak make the differences clear.

It’s more taxing when commons mix, as they do, with the similarly sized and graceful black-headeds, which in winter lose their chocolate-coloured hoods. A smudge of the hood remains, and the black-headed’s legs and beak are red. But the most notable difference is the gleaming white outer wing in flight.

Behaviour also sets it apart. The black-headed is a noisy, gregarious bird, hunting for scraps in packs; aroused in city parks at any sign of passers-by offering food. The common gull, slightly larger and rounder-headed, tends to keep its distance on these occasions.

At the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, a favourite central London venue, common-gull behaviour last February was certainly not ‘common’. It held aloof from black-headed mob tactics, maintaining a polite distance, even among its own kind, on land and water.

Nonetheless, common gulls can have an eye for the main chance and will grab food from black-headeds and contest roadkill and rubbish dumps with the other main species, as well as adding to the wake of ploughing tractors. They share the black-headed’s taste for probing mown turf for worms, their principal food, making them a familiar sight on winter sports fields, joining the spectators when disturbed by a game. By the sea, they drop molluscs from a height to crack the shells, in the way of hooded crows.

Like many sea birds, they ‘take to the hills’ for the nesting season. Their call ‘has a lovely, wild, lonely quality which is perfectly in keeping with the rugged nature of the Scottish breeding grounds’, writes Mark Cocker (Birds Britannica).

Hence its melancholy name sea mew and such local variations as white maa, blue maa, peerie maa, pikka maa, tinna maa and tanyick.