A Defence of Make-Up

Since I have been talking about nothing else all week... He looked lovely after his "make-under", but I had a pang of regret for his previous face. At one point, the public were asked whether they would have a fun night out with him. All the prissy little fuckers, decked in French Connection, lined up to say that he looks a weird nightmare. His response: "Are you serious?! It'd definitely be the night of your life. Look at me: do you know what I mean?" I know exactly what he means. To look like that in rural Scotland, and at that age, he must have a fantastic sense of humour about himself, and I genuinely admire his prostration before the altar of artificiality.

The show - Snog, Marry or Avoid - tries to create hate-figures out of the charmingly deluded and instead comes across as patronising and sententious. Some of the candidates are genuinely convinced that the artificial is beautiful, and that the natural is nothing. And as a confirmed aesthe I am forced to agree. Who are the BBC to tell them that they're wrong? Vicki James ("occupation: single mum") sounded like Baudelaire in a D-Cup when she presented her own Défence du maquillage, saying that "there is nothing that is naturally beautiful without make-up." That's almost an epigram.
I think their looks are interesting, and the programme simply suppresses the imitation of people like Jodie Marsh and Jordan in favour of the more socially-acceptable and middle-class models which the show offers them, like Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Aniston. Just as the drag-queen demonstrates the construction of feminity, the artifiality of these people, and the show itself, simply demonstrates how "the natural" is itself an artificial construction. It was meaningless of the dullard voxpops to say that they have bad dress sense. They have no dress sense, and that's much more interesting.