Even the glossy posse have bad days too

Tired after a long, busy and worrying year, we look pale, dry-skinned and increasingly wrinkled. We assume we have become unappealing, and even ugly, and our only hope is some very expensive surgery or an equally costly facial cream to revive our former allure.

Our sense of facial failure is heightened by the relentless flow of celebrity images we only dare glance at in the hairdressers. So idolised are celebrities that even Lindsay Lohan being escorted to prison made good copy.

The appearances of these women are the yardstick by which we judge our own physical attractiveness and good looks.

A few years ago, attempts by a brand of soap to portray beauty differently, as something more spiritual and internal, linked to maturity and dignity, fleetingly hit the billboards.

Pictures of wrinkled or corporally well-endowed women were festooned on posters and on television advertisements. This seemed to be casting a new net over what constituted 'true' beauty. No longer was it young, wrinkle-free or sun-tanned and svelte, but externally imperfect while radiating tranquillity and joy. 

Clones

These images and advertisements have now vanished and whether they had any impact on our collective sense of what beauty was is questionable.

The recent World Cup hasn't helped boost our confidence either, as we were regaled by the sideshow of wives and girlfriends, cuttingly called WAGS.

More photographed that the footballers, they too have a sameness about them -- blonde, luscious lipped and perfectly coiffured, they have strutted their way into the celebrity world, too, their only claim to fame being that they are in a relationship with a player.

Sporting designer dresses and bags, they are fashionable clones. In this fashion 'Eurovision', us ordinary mortals cannot compete and we score 'nul points' to their 1,000.

While they appear to be mirrors of each other, there is hardly a woman who would not like to be turned out like them, dressed and manicured to perfection. But we know also that there must be another, more real side to these creatures.

How do they look first thing in the morning, or after a night awake with a colicky baby? Is their hair really that shiny or is the real version dry and lank, artificially enhanced for the photo-op?

In an apparent attempt to reassure us ordinary women that we too could look like they do -- given money, make-up artists and airbrushing -- there are multiple websites with pictures of celebs minus make-up and designer labels. These are indeed reassuring.

They demolish the image of the current beauty icons as universally long-legged, blonde and blemish free.

Unrecognisable

At the same time as reassuring us, they also shock us because the people we see in them are unrecognisable, often puffy-eyed, slightly overweight -- untidy images of their public selves.

Some of the websites ask questions such as 'Who's the most normal without make-up?', 'who's the most ugly?', 'who's the most unrecognisable?' and so on. And the list is long -- everybody from Renee Zellweger to Oprah Winfrey and Madonna are there, reassuring us that they too are just like us: pedestrian in shape, some more attractive than others, but most very different from the image that is etched in our psyche. Worryingly, these images also prove what the feminist and founder of the magazine Spare Rib, Rosie Boycott, claimed when she expressed concern that the "oppressive cosmetics industry" forced women to aspire to be beautiful.

It is clear that they also have power to determine the form that beauty should take and that the trickery of lighting and airbrushing plays a significant part in determining this at present. Nature, it seems, has little role any more.

But beauty is fickle, as art surely shows. Rotund women were once the epitome of what was considered attractive, while pallor was also a measure of beauty, thanks to generous coatings of lead-containing power on the face. Now it is the sun-tanned, waif-like look.

What we also know, thanks to our access to the internet, is that what is regarded as beautiful may be ephemeral. Those whom we once thought had faces and shapes we could not even dream of emulating are really as imperfect as we are. Beauty is skin deep after all.

- Patricia Casey