Are you wearing make up? Well done, you're a proper feminist

This morning, Miss V directed me to this article by Liz Jones of the Daily Mail. In it, she chastises Holly Willoughby for posting a photo of her natural, slap-free face on her Twitter page. What follows is an impassioned haughty tirade against TV's sweetheart &any other women who dare to leave the house without a trace of a single cosmetic product on their visage.


We live in a confusing old world, don't we? 'Snog Marry Avoid' graces our screens every Monday, as everyone's favourite purple camera lens travels boldly up and down the nation to rid Britain of slap addicts. Then we have Ms Jones, who tells us that women who go slap free are doing little more than peddling a fantasy, an elusive ideal that no mere mortal can live up to. What's a girl to do?


We are told, quite emphatically: 'We all need help, don’t we? To deny this is to denounce womanhood itself. It is arrogant, over-confident one-upmanship. I, on the other hand, published in these pages a picture of my genuine ‘morning face’: what I look like as I open my sticky, puffy eyes on the world, in a stained old T-shirt.'



I'm not quite sure what Ms Jones is getting at here... Is she to be congratulated for posting a 'truer' image of her morning face? The photo of Jones' natural self is positioned next to a photo of a seemingly different woman all together, she's clearly gone to great efforts to mask her morning face with a sizeable dose of macquillage. It's as if she's saying 'we all look rough in the morning don't we? By putting on a pile of make-up I'm telling you that, I, like you, need help to look this good, so there's another point to feminism.' 


Are we to believe that a woman's secret weapon is her 'Laura Mercier tinted moisturiser and hydrating primer, Chanel Vitalumiere foundation, YSL touché eclat No2, Chantecaille powder, Nars blusher, and on and on'? I get that some of us aren't blessed with Ms Willoughby's 'teeny tiny pores', but why all the finger pointing &bitchiness? In a world where us girls are in pursuit of beauty (whatever that is), isn't it nice to be reminded that it's ok, nay, a good thing to go au naturale once in a while, no matter what our morning faces may be? My beauty regime (if it ever happens) consists of kohl &lip tint. That's really it. Not because I see myself as a beacon of natural beauty, but because I'm lazy. Does this make me more or less of a woman? No.


For Liz Jones to suggest that women who go slap-free are 'anti-feminist' is equally ludicrous as the assertion that women who spend three hours getting ready in the morning are paragons of womanhood. Why does one group have to be pitted against the other? Why is it that this piece assumes that our beauty regimes dictate whether we are for our against our sex? 

I don't wish to criticise Liz Jones for her apparently extensive beauty regime. What she puts on her face is her business, and if it makes her happy, well, good for her. Nor am I one of those raging 'feminists' who assume that a slight discrepancy of a single woman halts the march of our sex. What I do think, however, is that rather than claiming one- upmanship on those of us who go slap free, she could do Ms Willoughby and others like her a favour, and allow them to love their morning faces without fear of judgement. 

Miss Dx