In this paper, we prove that the bound
\begin{equation*}\max \{ |8A-7A|,|5f(A)-4f(A)| \} \gg |A|^{\frac{3}{2} + \frac{1}{54}}\end{equation*} holds for all
$A \subset \mathbb R$, and for all convex functions f which satisfy an additional technical condition. This technical condition is satisfied by the logarithmic function, and this fact can be used to deduce a sum-product estimate
\begin{equation*}\max \{ |16A|, |A^{(16)}| \} \gg |A|^{\frac{3}{2} + c},\end{equation*} for some
$c\gt 0$. Previously, no sum-product estimate over
$\mathbb R$ with exponent strictly greater than
$3/2$ was known for any number of variables. Moreover, the technical condition on f seems to be satisfied for most interesting cases, and we give some further applications. In particular, we show that
\begin{equation*}|AA| \leq K|A| \implies \,\forall d \in \mathbb R \setminus \{0 \}, \,\, |\{(a,b) \in A \times A : a-b=d \}| \ll K^C |A|^{\frac{2}{3}-c^{\prime}},\end{equation*} where
$c,C \gt 0$ are absolute constants.