The latest fad in beauty treatments is the “5:2 Makeup Diet”. (That is assuming you’re reading this on Sunday. By Monday it’ll be something else; muesli facials, perhaps, or the hot new Japanese chip-pan massage. By mid-week, I hear, owl wee moisturiser is going to be huge.)
The 5:2 Makeup Diet is a cosmetic version of the weird food fad that had suggestible people fainting every Wednesday and Friday afternoon for most of 2013. The idea is to eschew makeup for two days a week and go about barefaced.
It follows a study that found two thirds of British women wear makeup seven days a week and 71% suffer skin problems as a result of excessive foundation.
Skincare guru Dr Tijion Esho, from Channel 4’s Bodyshockers, says: “Taking makeup breaks of one or two days a week will dramatically improve your skin health and appearance by allowing healthy skin cells to regenerate.”
I’d be interested to know more about Dr Esho’s medical qualifications. Is this definitely how skin cells work? I’m not saying he skipped any of the key phases of medical school, but I will say that if I were suffering chest pains or a sudden blinding headache, I wouldn’t necessarily be reassured by the advice of someone whose Twitter handle is @IAMDRBEAUTIFUL.
I admit I was shocked to hear that two thirds of women wear makeup seven days a week. Seven days a week? That is just because they can’t be bothered to wash it off between Saturdays, right?
If true, it sits amusingly with that other recent study which found that only a fifth of women have a shower or bath every day – which in itself is no big deal, but only 57% even “acknowledge the importance of hygiene”.
That means, if my maths are right, that even if there’s a full crossover between the non-hygiene-acknowledgers and the non-makeup-wearers, that still leaves 10% of women who are both crawling with filth and caked in makeup. How very Elizabethan.
But my problem with the 5:2 Makeup Diet is exactly the same as my problem with the idea of wearing makeup seven days a week: routine. Joyless, Sisyphean routine.
Virginia Nicholson’s new book, Perfect Wives In Ideal Homes, published last week, poignantly illustrates how the women of the 1950s yearned for the innovative technology of the era to liberate them from repetitive drudgery: wash day and mangle on Monday, jam-making on Tuesday, floors and doorsteps on Wednesday… They wandered, drooling, round the Ideal Home Exhibition, dreaming about owning fridges and washing machines – the new, magical robots of liberation.
Are our faces the new mangles? Our lips the new jam? Our eyebrows the new floors? This metaphor out of hand? It seems as though the moment a combination of white goods and feminism created a bit of freedom and flexibility in our schedules, a flood of cosmetic hogwash poured in to clog them up again.
Seven days a week, five days a week, why impose any kind of timetable on what should be, if anything, the expression of sporadic whim? I have nothing against the principle of makeup or physical self-embellishment; I’m grateful to live in a world where my presentability is not reliant on God’s mercy alone.
A few years ago, for various reasons, I suffered a depression – a proper, pill-popping, bed-ridden depression – and I associate bad skin, unwashed hair and awful diet with that phase where I didn’t much care if I lived or died, never mind what my face looked like.
Trying to look slightly cleaner and prettier than one would with no effort at all is connected, for me anyway, with self-esteem, and self-esteem is an aid to all kinds of professional, social and domestic well-being.
Besides, it can be fun. Our culture, keen as ever on binary divides, likes to categorise women either as grooming-obsessed birdbrains or intellectual frumps. Either there’s no room in your tiny head for anything but seaweed wraps and £500 handbags, or you can read and write but you’ve worn the same beige tights for a month.
This false division creates a clever situation where women cannot but feel guilty and embarrassed – either for caring too much or not caring enough – and thus we get our come-uppance for the invention of the washing machine.
But I’m a perfectly bright and hard-working person; I can speak French and do maths; I maintain a mild interest in current affairs and social justice; I also feel quite excited about a shiny new lipstick or a creamy pot of moisturiser, and screw you if you think that makes me an idiot.
Nevertheless, I have to work quite hard to keep remembering not to be frightened by a beauty industry which threatens the total disintegration of my face and body due to my shameful failure to adopt a proper “routine”: to shop for makeup weekly, to go to “spas”, to have pedicures and skin peels and vein zaps and bum pummels, all under the horrifically misleading title of “pampering”. As soon as it’s a routine, I think, it’s immediately awful. Makeup is only fun if it’s occasional and capricious – just like it’s a treat to have an empty day ahead, but it wouldn’t be if you were doing 20 years in Parkhurst. I like snow, but I don’t want to live in Siberia.
So: break free, my sisters who are wearing makeup seven days a week! You shouldn’t do anything seven days a week except eat, excrete and remember to be grateful when you haven’t got something in your eye.
But wearing makeup five days a week, then going without for two, is not breaking free. That’s just a different but equally monotonous routine. And you can definitely trust me, because I’m not a doctor.
