Hugely portentous developments in celebronomics this week, as Victoria Beckham announced on social media she was mostly using a moisturiser created from her own blood. The product is called Sturm, and was fashioned for her by someone fashionable in Berlin.

Anyway, here’s the science bit – or Victoria’s Instagram caption, which is basically the same thing. According to Victoria, this facialist “took my blood and created healing factors made by my own cells which is highly anti-inflammatory and regenerative”. And, at £1,200 a pot, you HAVE to believe that.

If you’re wondering about the decision to brand the product Sturm, I should say it’s called that after the creator, Dr Barbara Sturm. But nonetheless, it feels right. I think if I did want moisturiser made by the Germans out of my own blood, I would want it to have a name like Sturm. There’s a €50m-a-year market in a spot treatment called Blitzkrieg, if Barbara’s got the balls for it. I hereby waive all intellectual property rights.

Then again, I expect Dr Sturm is doing very nicely on the £1,200 moisturisers and child facial spin-off line, given that Victoria also posted a picture of her seven-year-old daughter having a treatment, accompanied by the clarion call: “We must use CLEAN products on our children!” To which the peer-reviewed rejoinder is: complete bollocks. A sponge to remove the more stubborn Haribo traces is absolutely fine.

Anyway, Dr Sturm’s specialism is in what is sometimes called “the vampire facial”, which reminds us of the absolute importance of distinguishing yourself in the crowded batshit facialist market. In fact, the blood treatment market itself is becoming increasingly saturated, as late-stage capitalism moves into its banter phase, and the super-rich tire even of metaphor. Either they are treated with their own blood, which is effectively a bald statement that they are their own cure, or they are treated with the blood of poorer civilians, which is a statement too bald even to gloss.

We’ll deal with the latter first. I read an article in a scientific journal last year that sketched a $195-a head “gala”/“symposium” held in a rich beachside retirement community in Florida, where a promoter was selling senior citizens the chance to be transfused with the blood of the young, in order to halt or even reverse aspects of the ageing process. Since then, a number of further articles have detailed this growing trend and, this week, the anti-ageing transfusion firm Ambrosia announced it had opened blood-swap clinics in five major US cities. Young blood is $8,000 (£6,200) a litre, or $12,000 (£9,300) for two litres.

There is literally nothing boomers won’t take off young people for the thrill of feeling better for five minutes

Boomers are incredible, aren’t they? They’re WILD! There is literally nothing they won’t take off young people for the cheap thrill of feeling better for about five minutes. We surely can’t be far off the logical, physical extrapolation of the policies they have pursued electorally across half the world: to wit, every single boomer being directly IV-tubed up to their own dedicated support millennial, into whose veins they can empty all the aged cells and plasma of a person who knew what a proper welfare state and well-funded free education looked like. In return, they can flood themselves with the priced-by-the-litre lifeblood of people being charged £1,600 pcm to a live in a shower cubicle with a pulldown bed and a hot tap marked “KETTLE”.

Needless to say, Ambrosia has been previously linked to Peter Thiel, the creepiest pretend libertarian in Silicon Valley – tough field – who once asserted that “death is a problem that can be solved”. But, according to his publicists, Thiel is not yet relying on young blood to deliver on his threat of sticking around indefinitely. Ambrosia is clearly expanding, though, with its doctor CEO claiming that transfusions can cause things such as grey hair to be turned black again. There is, of course, absolutely no proper evidence of any of this. He also claims to see in his patients “a remarkable difference in pep”, which feels like something you probably shouldn’t be using as a science-y metric. I have a remarkable difference in pep every time I buy a new pair of earrings in H&M, but, you know what? I didn’t have to drain a teen for it.

Even more ironicidal, alas, is the fact that you can’t even remunerate the young people providing the blood. According to various reports into Ambrosia, it is illegal to pay people for their blood, so they have to rely on donor facilities.

Next to this, then, Beckham’s moisturiser feels quite tame. She is joined in the use-your-own-blood market by Gwyneth Paltrow, who has previously had some doctor come on her Goop website and explain something called “autoblood”, which is “injecting a person’s own venous blood into the gluteal muscle once weekly for a number of weeks to reduce autoimmunity, strengthen the immune system, and detoxify”.

Gwyneth Paltrow Photograph: Mike Windle/Getty Images for Airbnb

Mmm. Perhaps. And yet, perhaps not. As we know, Gwyneth is the high priestess of selling you shit to heal the ailments that other shit you bought off her may conceivably have caused. I always imagine the classic satisfied customer’s letter. “Dear Goop. Thank you for selling me the $66 jade egg to put up my vagina and walk around with, which I loved. In an unexpected development I have yet to ascribe to any particular cause, I began to have lower back pain shortly after the purchase. But I love the $89 fascia blaster I purchased to help with this. For whatever reason, I now have long-lasting bruising on my back, and wonder if you have anything in the $100-$200 range that might assist in the treatment of this? Yrs in wellness.” What an end-to-end service it is.

Still, until they literally start harvesting our blood, perhaps the chance to boggle at their self-satirising anti-ageing treatments is what we want from our more preposterous celebrities. Consider the gaiety added to various nations by the vanity quests of Simon Cowell, whose reliance on Botox dates back almost to the start of botulism. I could never believe he broke up his love affair with his own makeup artist. It was just so perfect. I guess you’re only as good as your last contouring palette.

As far as the secret of eternal youth went, Cowell was always a restless searcher. I am drawn back to a passage in Tom Bower’s biography of him, with which he collaborated heavily. At one point, Cowell is “forced to fire a half-deaf woman who had visited weekly to cover him with oil, wrap him in cellophane and squeeze him into a tube with the promise that the paralysing discomfort and itching were guaranteed to detoxify and oxygenate him”. Fair play to her.

Cowell’s next obsession was spending five grand for one hour’s treatment in a “bubble”. “Three men had carried the contraption to his bedroom,” noted Bower. It promised to detox, induce weight loss and prolong life. “I hated it,” Cowell tells him. Apparently, “the German applying the treatment had spent the entire hour promoting his ideas for new TV shows, with the captive patient forced to listen”. Poor Simon. That said, he’ll be begging to go back to “the bubble” when he finds out what the afterlife has in store for him.