Whether you get stretch marks depends on genes not creams, says Alison Sparkes

A teenage girl was in the pool changing room, twisting herself like a pipe cleaner, trying to look at the backs of her thighs. Lissom and lean, pearly and pert, this post-pubescent nymph pulled down her brows on a face ten years away from its first wrinkle and wailed:
‘See. Look! I can never go on the beach without my shorts again.’
Her friend peered anxiously at her.
‘I think you’re worrying too much. They hardly show.’
‘They do! ’ shrieked the deformed one. ‘Look at them! I’ve got stretch marks.’

I’d had enough. I strode over, wrapped in my towel.
‘Let me see.’ I glanced at her dimple-free skin and could just make out the tiniest of silvery lines – barely discernible, like a watermark on posh paper.
‘Look, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Those aren’t stretch marks. These are.’
And, rather brutally perhaps, I showed her the real thing.

Having earned stretch marks that make me look as if I’ve been clawed by a grizzly bear, the impact was immediate. They both looked aghast. In their frightened eyes I could see Britain’s future population dropping further.

Politely, they agreed that perhaps I had the edge on stretch marks. It was a bit unfair, though, because it wasn’t long after the birth of my second baby. The rifts were still violently pink. Now they’ve settled to silvery-violet and I no longer look as if I might unravel like a ball of wool.

I inherited the kind of skin with all the elasticity of damp rice paper, so the odds were never good where stretch marks were concerned. Yet I barely notice them these days and even wore a bikini last summer on the day it didn’t rain.

Like many first time mums, stretch marks crept up on me quietly and then struck, in the middle of the night, like an earthquake. It was ages before I realised the extent of the disaster, simply because I couldn’t see below my waist. My sister eventually broke the bad news. I was telling her, as I massaged in the anti-stretch mark cream, that I didn’t seem to have a problem with them. Nicky smothered a snort.

She got a mirror and tilted it. The pattern of cracks rising from my groin to my belly button were the sort of thing you see in Channel 4 documentaries, following some cataclysmic shifting of tectonic plates.

After a subdued five minutes, I got chocolate and began to eat to forget…After all, how you fare with stretch marks depends on your genes. You can’t avoid them – they’re the skin’s natural way of dealing with an epidermal strain, beyond the regular call of duty. Look to your mother to gauge your fate. Fortunately, not everyone gets my skin. Friends of mine with more olive complexions seem to have got away with a few hairline cracks. And younger, fitter women seem to get away with it better too. You know, the kind who drop a healthy eight-pounder, nip down the gym and pop back into shape with a muted sucking noise, in just under ten days. On the other hand, if you take pregnancy as a licence to eat for a family of six, (as I did) you’re going to end up looking like you’ve carried a family of six.

Stretch mark prevention creams are universally acknowledged to be useless. Think about it. It’s like trying to hold back the Severn Bore with a bit of cling film. But stretch mark creams will always exist. Like aphrodisiacs and magic weight loss teas – they’re a triumph of hope over common sense.

The one thing I can say for them is that they smell lovely, and they do feel nice, particularly on those grim third trimester evenings when you feel like you’re going to rip asunder if someone gives you a push or a nasty look. I massaged mine in nightly, throughout the last third of both pregnancies, and I think that was beneficial in itself. It’s also nice to get a partner to do it. Ideally, your own.

Ultimately, as Tom Conti said in ‘Shirley Valentine’, stretch marks are a part of you and you should be proud of them. (Although I don’t necessarily go along with the idea of painting them with glitter and waving them at the postman.) And there’s really no point in worrying about how they’ll look on the beach next summer. Out of 365 days a year, with your budget and your strength now stretched as far as your beleaguered belly, how much time on the beach do you reckon you’ll get?