Former glamour model Alicia Douvall has revealed she was celibate for ten years before finding love with her husband David Anstiss.
Douvall, 47, married the business leader earlier this month in a church ceremony in front of 90 of their closest friends and family.
Reflecting on their love story, Douvall said she had never wanted to get married and had given up on love before meeting Anstiss. "I'd switched off, I'd been celibate for 10 years and wasn't looking for anymore," she told OK! Magazine. "I've always been the runaway bride who never wanted to get married. But when I finally did, it was the most amazing thing ever. Neither of us had been in love before which made it really special."
Douvall soon fell for Anstiss, who wooed her with dinners at Michelin-star restaurants and stays at boutique hotels.
A Maldives proposal
Six months later, Anstiss, who is director of Solution Engineering, proposed in the Maldives at sunset. Douvall said she had no idea he was going to do so. The couple planned their wedding after returning to the UK.
Five weeks before the big day, Douvall walked away from her £12,000 designer gown after falling out with the bridal team. She ended up designing her own dress with a small boutique, a strapless satin gown with a five-metre veil. After losing a stone, her wedding and evening reception dress had to be altered at the last minute.
Despite the stress, the wedding went off without a hitch. Douvall's daughters, Georgia, 31, and Papaya, 14, whom she raised as a single mother, were her bridesmaids. Both have formed a close bond with Anstiss, who sees them as his daughters.
The reception was held at a country house, where the party "line-danced into the night." The couple then jetted off for a minimoon to Spain and will honeymoon in the Seychelles next year.
Turning her back on surgery
Douvall, who has had more than 400 cosmetic procedures over the years, said finding love has helped her turn her back on surgery. After 18 boob jobs, 11 nose tweaks, bum implants and even having her ribs shaved down, she gave up going under the knife and over the past decade has built a successful skincare brand centred, ironically, on the ethos of natural anti-ageing.
"I'm so proud of what I've done to put that chapter behind me, it's a scary world with so much fakeness, we need more honesty about self-acceptance and mental health," she said.
The beauty brand marks quite the pivot for Douvall, whose previous life ambition was to have the biggest boobs in Britain.
From boarding school to body dysmorphia
Born Sarah Howes, she changed her name to one more suited to glamour modelling. Her father was a self-made millionaire and Conservative councillor, and she attended the prestigious Springfield Park School in Horsham, West Sussex.
Douvall has said being sent to boarding school aged nine was the start of her issues with self-confidence and an obsession with her looks. She was later diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder, also called dysmorphia, a mental illness linked to anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, in which sufferers obsess over their appearance and have a distorted perception of the way they look.
After 20 years of being known for her enhancements, Douvall has reinvented herself as a spokeswoman for ageing naturally. In 2011, she and her daughter Georgia launched Douvall's beauty brand after discovering the benefits of cold-pressed argan oil on their skin.
Douvall, who once sparked outrage when she said she wouldn't mind if her eldest daughter had plastic surgery too, launched the business with Georgia and invested all of her £20,000 savings. It has since paid off, with the brand stocked in Sephora and Superdrug in the UK and Walmart in the US.
