The Ugly Truth About Beauty

America’s Top Model. Nip/Tuck. Extreme Makeover. How to Look Good Naked.

Switch on a TV anywhere in the western world and you’re confronted with images of beautiful people. Toned butts. Firm abs and teeth so sparkly you can see them from space.

All those lovely people - plus adverts for diet pills, exercise equipment and facial creams being crammed into our inboxes and mailboxes each and every day – make it easy to assume that The Way You Look is wrong and The Way They Look is what you should aspire to. After all, isn’t the message behind movies like The Devil Wears Prada that LOOKS are far more important than WHO you are?

In that movie, brainy Andy Sachs heads to Manhattan to begin a job at fashion magazine Runway. But before her boss Miranda takes brilliant Andy seriously, the brainy brunette has to shed the pounds and squeeze her size six butt into a skinny pair of Dolce and Gabbanas.

I mean, is it just me, or is the premise of a movie in which ridiculously gorgeous Anne Hathaway is considered fat just plain wrong?

But that’s the way the world is at the moment. Beauty is all important and if brainless-but-beautiful models like Miss Teen USA 2007 candidate Caitlin Upton have taught us anything, it’s that pretty people can achieve things regardless of their intellectual limitations.

But the result of this obsession with looks?

Scores of beautiful young men and women now think that they can succeed on looks alone.

That belief is flawed for many reasons – the main one being that beauty isn’t exactly uncommon.

If you’re willing to skip school to spend hours in the gym, or spend your savings on a boob job and teeth whitening, you too can become one of the ‘beautiful’ people.

Youth, exercise and diet are generally the foundation of good looks and the rest is just icing on the cake. But even after you’ve become ‘beautiful,’ the opportunities out there are limited.

There can only be one ‘America’s Top Model.’ James Bond only auditions for the next ‘Bond girl’ every three years or so. Sometimes, beautiful people have to take the opportunities on offer, whatever they are.

And that’s where you’ll find the real tragedy in being beautiful.

One infamous radio ‘Shock Jock,’ has beautiful young actresses on his show all the time (which seems pointless. Surely all cats are grey over the airwaves.) There’s a huge line of beautiful models and aspiring actresses clamoring for the chance to get into his studio and maybe hit the big time. But what is the price of this opportunity?

An example: A few months ago, he had beautiful young women on their hands and knees, attempting to catch meatballs (dripping in pasta sauce) between their buttocks. The audience whooped and hollered and the girls played along in good spirits – but what was going through their mind?

It must have been depressing. Their media ‘breakthrough’ involved kneeling like a dog with cold spaghetti sauce dripping down their thighs – and if they’d turned their nose up at this opportunity, there would have been a hundred other girls willing to do it in their place.

It seems in this looks obsessed society we live in, the only thing we love more than beautiful people is degrading them. It seems there’s no shortage of television programs, made for TV movies or raunchy frat-boy magazines willing to lead beautiful people through the meat grinder with the fleeting promise of fame. And worst of all? There’s no shortage of beautiful people willing to follow them.

If reading Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister has taught me anything, it’s that beautiful people risk their beauty becoming their defining feature.

So what’s the secret of the truly successful ‘beautiful’ people?

Being beautiful has never been their primary characteristic. It might have opened doors for them, but it’s never been the secret of their success.

Whether it was talent as an actress (like the wonderful Meryl Streep) or skills as a firebrand (like vile political pundit Anne Coulter) the ‘beautiful’ people who’ve made their mark had something going for them other than just their looks. That’s just the icing on the cake.

So if you’re a ‘beautiful person’ and you want to make it as a model, actress or just a diva like Paris Hilton, take one piece of advice from me (a fully qualified non-beautiful person.)

Have something that sets you apart from the rest. Skills. Talents. Opinions. Or a very rich daddy.

Be your own person. Set your own standards. Never let your (beautiful) reflection in the mirror reflect everything about who you are.

When Fit is Fat...

Take a look at the picture to the left.

That’s pop-princess Britney Spears, rocking to her latest hit at the MTV Video Music Award.

As you might have heard, the critics weren’t too impressed with her performance. Despite recently struggling through her divorce, rehab, the head shaving malarkey and accusations of bad parenting, Britney’s performance got no slack from the likes of The New York Post or E! Online.

Now you’d think they might have attacked her poorly coordinated dancing, or her inability to mime. Both of those skills seemed sorely lacking from Spear’s sequence on stage. However, instead the critics are attacking her weight:

“Lard and Clear,” wrote The New York Post. “The bulging belly she was flaunting was SO not hot," hissed E! Online.

I’ll ask you again to take a look at the picture I posted. Does that really resemble a lardy lady? Does Britney’s belly really bulge? Of course not. She looks absolutely gorgeous!

But of course The New York Post and E! Online are not judging Britney against other women – real women. She’s being compared to the likes of 80lb Nicole Richie, or Size 0 supermodels who faint if they have to climb a flight of stairs. Unless there’s stringy muscle and angular bone showing through the skin, no woman is apparently beautiful.

No wonder between 2% and 5% of all Americans have some kind of eating disorder – a condition much more prevalent amongst teenage girls programmed with an impossible standard of beauty.

With more and more emphasis being placed on what you look like, rather than who you are, girls are being forced to feel more and more self conscious about their size and weight. They want to look like the women the media tells them are sexy. What nobody bothers to mention, however, is that the girls on television and the catwalk aren’t real or normal.

Britney’s pre-baby washboard stomach? She managed to maintain that with a regimen of 1,000 sit-ups a day. On line websites reveal that catwalk models often survive on diets of 600 calories a day or less – about a quarter of what’s recommended for a healthy woman. These women maintain their skinny appearance and abnormal muscle tone by living a lifestyle that’s totally unnatural and unhealthy.

Throw in the peroxide hair, the hours on the sun bed and the appetite suppressing effects of a daily packet of Marlboro Lights or a line of cocaine and the world’s most ‘beautiful’ are on the fast track to resembling burnt out crack whores by the time they hit 35.

It’s utterly disgusting and E! Online and The New York Post should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for writing what they did. Say what you want about Britney’s white trash mannerisms, her terrible taste in men, her poorly rehearsed dance moves or the fact that she couldn’t remember the words to her own song. She’s still Bikini Beautiful and that’s after popping out two sprogs in a short space of time. Try that at home, kids. It’s harder than it looks.

Look at the traditional icons of feminine beauty. Sophia Loren (consistently voted one of the sexiest women in the world even as she hits 73) or the ultimate American icon, Marilyn Monroe. You could use a lot of words to describe those magnificently proportioned women. Skinny isn’t one of them.

When it comes to the crunch, a woman who resembles a rake isn’t attractive. The most beautiful women are like finely designed Italian sports cars. All curves and no brakes. Hopefully there will be a backlash soon and people will start accepting that.

Not forgetting, of course, that there’s more to life than looks. Take Miss Teen USA contestant Caitlin Upton, an honor Student from Lexington High School, who had this to say when asked: “A fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?”

“I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some, uh, people out there in our nation don't have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our...”

I’m sorry, E! Online and The New York Post. I’m not buying into your absurd standards of feminine beauty.

A girl can look as gorgeous as you like (and Caitlin Upton does look absolutely gorgeous.) But there is nothing sexy about being as dumb as a bag of rocks.

F*** off I'm ginger...

As some of you might have noticed, I was featured on BBC's Body Image documentry "F*** off I'm Ginger" the other night.

I was a bit nervous, but they didn't make me look like an idiot and I got some very surprised reactions (my boss left a voicemail: What are you doing on my television? Get off! I feel violated!)

Tina got a kick out of it too... Checking the ripples the program made on the internet a few days later, we found this comment from called Cybernoob:

"I thought the program was good and your guy presentin it was great. Just shows in America and other countrys no such problems exist wih redheads and is actually mostly embraced. Did you see that Italian woman that guy married in America? Hot hot hot!"

Yes. I married a hottie. Not bad for a ginger.