This is the real me.
Angela Mollard says this 'polished' look is not real.
IF YOU'RE ever unfortunate enough to catch me commentating on
Channel Nine about a ton of subjects I know very little about you'll
note I look pretty polished. Hair brushed. Lipstick shiny. Eyes
unnaturally blue.
Likewise, if you’re a regular reader of this page - which, of
course, you are *twists arm behind back* - you’ll know me as the chick
with flawless skin and good taste in shirts.Oh readers, I have a confession - it's not me! Well, I suppose it's a version of me: one who has "Luminous Silk" on my face, "Showstopper" and "Woodwinked" on my eyes, "Malaysian Mist" on my nails and "Honolulu Honey" on my lips (why are make-up products never called Eritrea Escape or Uzbekistan Bliss?)
On top of that is trowelled two types of concealer - one for lines, one for spots, two types of eyeliner - liquid and powder, volumising mascara, false eyelashes, some gel taming my spidery brows into arches, an unguent hand-squeezed by Moroccan mamas in my hair and something called "Orgasm" on my cheeks ($42.95 online if you want to save yourself the faff of a genuine post-coital flush).
And that's just for the telly. For this newspaper there's another hour's worth of hair tousling, a stylist bulldog-clipping my top - which is not actually mine, a photographer encouraging me to "raise my chin but not that much" and a wind machine lifting my hair artfully round my face but, in reality, drying out my contact lenses and making me squint. And the brief for the pics was "friendly". Imagine the palaver for "sultry" or "glamazon".
Anyway, today you're getting me in my hallway at 8am on Tuesday. Fresh out of bed, lunchboxes made, favourite jeans, and not a skerrick of make-up or a photographer's fancy light to obliterate the imperfections.
I'm not showing you the real me because I'm "down-to-earth" or have come over all Gwyneth (I can't think of anything worse than a quinoa burger) or am hormone drunk like Fifi Box (oh how I loved that make-up free pic of her with newborn baby Trixie).
No, I'm revealing myself in all my sallow-skinned, broken-veined, wrinkly and splotchy glory because we all look like this.
OK, maybe not Miranda Kerr. But I've seen plenty of stars without make-up - Kate Moss, Rebecca Gibney, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, Georgie Gardner, Cameron Diaz, Lara Bingle - and they all look great but not at all like the woman you see reading the news or in movies or draped half-naked on sofas advertising perfume.
This week I saw Caterina Torres, that hottie from The Voice without make-up and, yeah, pretty, but not shimmery and backlit like you know her.
Why we need to talk about this - and why I'm showing myself at my least glamorous - is because girls need to see what's real (boys, too, need to know that the men in fitness magazines are oiled, professionally lit and Photoshopped.)
Last week I heard that two teenagers I know are cutting themselves, slicing into the skin on their arms and hips because of a panoply of problems, chief among them body image.
"All her life I've been able to make things better," one mum confessed. "But how do you treat the pain of not feeling pretty enough?"
In the supermarket, another mother I haven't seen in over a year chronicled her 16-year-old's distressing battle with anorexia. "It started with the thigh gap," she revealed. "They're all obsessed with having space between their thighs."
Of course, these issues are deeper than the images they see. But when 43 per cent of girls report body image as a "significant concern" in the latest Mission Australia youth survey, the wiser among us have a duty to expose the chicanery for what it is.
It's no longer enough to grab headlines (and book sales) with revelations like those of former Australian Vogue editor Kirstie Clements that models are eating tissues and are so emaciated they have to be propped up at shoots.
Likewise, we have to do more than have spirited, but ultimately fruitless, debates about the size of models and the stretching, retouching, cloning and liquifying that goes on in Photoshop.
While such trickery exists we need to show - not just tell - our girls exactly how they are being manipulated.
That's why I applaud British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman's decision to make a film exposing fashion's fakery. The program, to be shown in schools, will go behind the scenes on a fashion shoot, revealing not just the retouching but the make-up, lighting, photography and styling which goes into a single image.
As Shulman says, she hopes the program will stop "a 12-year-old looking at a fashion model in Vogue and thinking, 'Why don’t I look like that?'"
We should be doing the same. Asking Jen Hawkins or Megan Gale or Jess Hart to front a video showing the truth behind the images. If we owe anything to this generation of girls battered by the beauty storm, it's a little more honesty.
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