Angela O’Mara recoils at the mention of teen drama The OC. “It’s awful,” she says. Life in Newport Beach, Orange County, California – the setting for The OC – is “nothing like that”, she says.

But, if it’s not quite like TV, her corner of the world is the land of beautiful people. And O’Mara has done her bit to make them yet more beautiful. Her company, The Professional Image, has provided PR, training and consultancy work for the cosmetic surgery industry for more than 20 years.

“The goal of the majority is to look naturally youthful,” she says. “This is what I see in patients and doctors that we work with. What they see in the mirror is not how they feel inside. You might be 55 or 60, you’ve got loads of energy, you’re really taking care of yourself but outwardly you don’t look as youthful. They just say: ‘I want a little rejuvenation’.

“The minority are the people who go in with an unrealistic expectation of wanting to look like Angelina Jolie or Pamela Anderson. The minority of surgeons are the ones who give people that look.”

O’Mara tells of a surgeon who was visited by 19-year-old twins, both models, who had already had lip injections, Botox and breast surgery, and were coming to him for nose jobs. “He said to them: ‘I definitely can improve your nose but I have to tell you that if you continue to have surgery at this pace, by the time you are 23, you are both going to look like freaks’,” she says.

O’Mara says much of the boom in cosmetic surgery has been fed by the buoyancy of the real estate market.

“People had all this equity in their homes and so they were encouraged to take it out for home improvement. Well how about self-improvement?,” she says. So, yes, people who felt their homes had made them rich went shopping for cosmetic surgery on credit. And when the credit crunch hit, cosmetic surgery was hit, too.

Recession was just part of a “perfect storm” of problems for O’Mara. At the same time, she had invested unwisely in a franchise business, which wasted much of her time and money. She had taken her eye off The Professional Image, entrusting it to others less dedicated, and several clients were lost. Then came the downturn.

Weathering that storm, building up her firm again in what she believes to be a new business climate, post-recession, O’Mara began writing a journal. It evolved into a seven-step business training programme, and is now published as a book, Lipstick. Laptops. Life: The rise and fall, and rise again, of a modern day business woman. This self-help book identifies a collection of feminine business archetypes, such as the Gold Miner, the Clairvoyant, the Realist, the

Alchemist, the Dare Devil, the Wrangler and the Success Siren. There’s a touch of the Oprah Winfrey about all this. And it’s a long way indeed from O’Mara’s roots. Born the youngest of six children to a truck-driving dad on a council estate in

Little Hulton, her horizons, after St George’s High School, Walkden, and Worsley Tech extended not much further than a secretarial job.

Working at Lewis’ department store, O’Mara was intrigued by pictures of shop windows in New York and Paris brought in by her boss. She heard of a neighbour who was going to work at a summer camp in upstate New York, and decided to go too.

O’Mara arrived in New York, aged 19, with just 200 dollars and, after working at the summer camp, set out with a group of friends on a two-week road trip across America. She settled in Santa Barbara, California, married, and later moved to Newport Beach. It was here that, working as a temp,

O’Mara got a job with H George Brennan, a cosmetic surgeon with rock star-like public profile.

“I just ‘got’ that world – the medical world, him and all that brought, which was a lot of media attention,” she says. “Then it was for the rich and famous. It was everyone’s best-kept secret ... or not! Because it was the days of the ‘ski jump’ nose or the totally pulled face.”

O’Mara began organising events for Brennan in Newport Beach to which she would invite the likes of Vogue and Cosmopolitan. In 1988 she started her own agency, doing PR for other cosmetic surgeons as well as Brennan.

Along the way, she had three children – 21-year-old Jonathon and 20-year-old twins Brandon and Briana – but later divorced. Her partner of 11 years is a Londoner. Back home, there is a large extended family, including mum Theresa O’Mara, now 86, who still lives in Little Hulton.

Though she has homes in Newport Beach and Mexico, as we speak in Worsley, O’Mara says she still thinks of Manchester as home. “I’m not high maintenance. I’m not a label person,” she says. “I was born in Little Hulton and those values have always stayed with me.”

It would normally be ungallant to ask a woman of 49, but in O’Mara’s case, the question is unavoidable: Has she ever had cosmetic surgery herself?

“I haven’t yet, but I definitely would consider having a facelift. I’ve had some dental work,” she smiles, revealing gleaming rows of perfect dentistry.

»Lipstick. Laptops. Life by Angela O’Mara from Amazon for £12.99 and from other online retailers.