Last updated at 12:41, Thursday, 28 July 2011

Twiggy’s no great shakes without one. David Cameron likes to be touched up gently around the hoardings with his. And when Vogue came to call, Kate Winslet wouldn’t have answered the door without promise of a big one at her disposal.

All the world loves an airbrush.

Hardly surprising really. Given the chance of a bit of let’s-pretend soft-focus around the sharp, jagged edges of disappointing reality, we’d all take a piece of suspended belief.

A bit of enhancement here, a sweep of rejuvenation there, pain-free nips and tucks around jowly bits and turkey necks –where’s the harm? Beyond inviting scoffing sneers of incredulity – no let’s-pretend airbrushing was ever swallowed whole as truth – there’s not much harm at all. Scoffing sneers don’t scar for life... well, not too often anyway.

But Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson’s having none of it. She doesn’t play those games. She wants us to stick like glue to grim reality, however miserable that might be.

She has persuaded consumer watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority, that when we women buy makeup, we are being cruelly duped by L’Oreal (among others) into believing we could look the way airbrushed Julia Roberts and Christy Turlington don’t even look. All we need do is use certain brands of miracle-promising foundation creams.

Ms Swinson claimed pictures used in cosmetic giant L’Oreal’s magazine campaigns were misleading and “not representative of the results the products could achieve” because they had been digitally manipulated.

Hey Jo... we knew that! We may be dreamers; we might well be in blissful denial of nature’s biggest let-downs – wrinkles, gravity, greying hair, thickening waists, bingo wings and the rest – but did you have to burst our bubble so brutally? Can’t a girl indulge in a little fantasy now and again?

The Advertising Standards Authority upheld her claim, of course. What else could it do?

Watchdogs agreed the images – used to promote products from the company’s Lancome and Maybelline brands – breached the code, were misleading and exaggerating.

L’Oreal’s two-page advert featured Roberts, who is the face of Lancome, promoted a foundation called Teint Miracle, while Turlington was the face of a Maybelline campaign for an “anti-ageing” foundation called The Eraser. Both have now been banned from publication.

L’Oreal admitted post-production techniques had been used in its advert featuring Christy Turlington to “lighten the skin, clean up makeup, reduce dark shadows and shading around the eyes, smooth the lips and darken the eyebrows”.

However, the dream-spinning beauty company said it believed the image accurately illustrated the results the product could achieve... which is more than the rest of us could say.

It also said the flawless skin in the image of Julia Roberts was down to her “naturally healthy and glowing skin” adding the product had taken 10 years to develop.

Maybe Ms Swinson just doesn’t get real women. Perhaps she hasn’t yet understood how we’re thinking and what we’re buying when we fork out too much of our hard-earned money for a pot of youth-fantasy face cream, a tube of wrinkle-erasing foundation or – dafter still – some lotion or other promising to magic away cellulite and flab.

We’re not buying reality – we already have that and it ain’t too cheery. We don’t want more indisputable science – gravity gives us that; our bottoms, boobs and eye-bags are proof of it.

We want to pay a way into impossible dreams. Like Twiggy, call-me-Dave and Kate, we prefer it when our lives are airbrushed with hopeless, self-deluding optimism of something better. Something lovelier.

Application of post-production techniques, a spot of smoothing out, thinning down and lifting up are the vital, ritualistic lies in every woman’s life – and a fair few men’s too. If we could, we’d be airbrushed and Photoshopped thoroughly before we left home in the morning – and once again at midday, just to be on the safe side.

Anyone would have to be two pies short of a packed lunch to believe that lotions, potions and powders could transform us into creatures with the wisdom, intelligence and worldly experience of 50-year-olds, all wrapped beautifully in the figures, complexions and glossy locks of 15-year-olds.

It isn’t possible. In no way is it natural. Life holds no such kindnesses for mere mortals. But we’ll play let’s-pretend with the best (and worst) of them.

The way we spend our money and time on our fantasies bears all that out. How many hopes in hell are there of winning the Lotto jackpot? Will the statistics stop us buying our tickets? No way.

You and I know full well that a basic moisturiser, costing under a fiver will perform all the functions promised by one priced at £50 or more. We know too that we’re paying outrageously over the odds for fancy, glitzy packaging that’s utterly useless for anything, other than bulking out the recycling bag.

Oh but the feel of being part of that delightful deception is so delicious, so uplifting. And don’t we all need cheering up now and again? Even with sweet little lies?

It beats me how Jo Swinson can get by without occasional escape into that wonderfully fanciful, deceitful world where – for a mark-up of a minimum 100 per cent – you can be sold a foundation cream or body lotion that seduces you shamelessly with wicked whispers. Then let’s you down, only to send you in search of yet another false promise.

Profit-fixated Lord Alan Sugar has never made a secret of his long-held desire to move into the cosmetics business. Why would he not? It’s a licence to print money, by use of blatant seductions. If only the rest of life’s troubles, problems, fears and insecurities could be so easily shelved by purchase of a tube of coloured cream, a tickling with an airbrush and a healthy measure of collective suspended belief.

With or without Jo Swinson, it will never happen, the ASA wouldn’t allow it. But it should... because we’re worth it.

First published at 11:25, Thursday, 28 July 2011
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk