Tabloids and gossip magazines alike rejoiced this week. Kate Moss, aged 35, was pictured on holiday in St Tropez with – who would have thought it – wrinkles. How dare she? She is a national icon! Not only has she let down the whole of Britain with her imperfections, she also has the audacity to appear without them on the cover of next month’s Vogue.
The wrinkled picture of Moss alongside the blemish-free one will be for many yet another piece of evidence that all when new model in modeling carrier to photographs - except those so thoughtfully provided by the paparazzi for our delectation - are fakes designed to trick us into buying expensive creams, getting plastic surgery and developing eating disorders in pursuit of perfection.
But it is hardly surprising that the media chooses to resort to digital enhancement when no one seems able to make up their minds over what ‘real’ women should actually look like these days. The ability of the media to contradict itself over celebrity beauty knows no bounds.
Fat is bad, we are told – symptomatic of overindulgence, and generally inconvenient for other people on public transport. But thin is bad too – a sign of obsessive exercise (take the images of Madonna’s arms this week) or, as in the case of Cheryl Cole during times of marital strife, of emotional distress. Upcoming new model Gossip magazines condemn celebrities at both ends of the spectrum - and although they laud ‘curvy’ female celebrities at film premieres, they swiftly return to condemnation when the cellulite that contributes to these curves is revealed on the beach.
Aesthetic opinion on height, too, has often changed over the years. Being tall has always secured fairly high approval online date ratings – from Book 20 of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’, where the goddess Artemis honours the daughters of Pandarus with the gift of height, to today, when even six-foot supermodels wear giant heels on the catwalk. On the other hand, we are frequently told that ‘men prefer short women’, so a definite ideal escapes us again.
Skin colour is even harder to get right. Nowadays, online date for Black is Beautiful girls, and so is the ivory pallor of models such as Lily Cole. There are also a fair few advocates of the varying shades of Satsuma sported by Jordan and her ilk. Today, a tan is a symbol of wealth that tacitly announces the possessor’s ability to afford holidays in the Maldives.
For the same reason however, historical precedent tends to favour whiteness – to the Romans, tanned beauty skin was the mark of someone who had to work outdoors, and the Elizabethans notoriously added lead to the make-up they used to create the same impression of a leisurely indoor existence. Shamefully, the same ideal still exists. In British pharmacies it is, appallingly, possible to buy ‘skin-lightening cream’ aimed at black women and at Asians hoping to escape the prejudice that associates darker skin with lower castes.
Even history, then, fails to solve the mystery of beauty and to settle the contradictions in modern women’s magazines. Perhaps we should have expected this all along, given that Helen of Troy, so famously described by Marlowe as “the face that launched a thousand ships”, is actually given very little physical description in Classical literature (interestingly, if she existed she would have had a dark, Mediterranean complexion and would little have resembled the blondes whom Hollywood chooses to play her). It seems that the Ancients may have been as stymied as we are as to what constitutes perfection.
Sadly for Kate Moss, Miranda Kerr and other supermodel, the only physical characteristics that appear never to have been in vogue are the signs of age, which is why they must be airbrushed away before she can be in, well, Vogue.
But given the evidence that tall, short, fat, thin, dark and fair people have all had their day at some point in history, and that we are now faced with an aging population, perhaps the wrinkle’s time is coming. May it fall to Moss and other supermodels Miranda Kerr don’t believe and they only ask it, do what she does best, and set the trend.
Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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