Holiday Ugly

Be not alarmed, I do not need reassurance about my holiday ugliness. I am (somewhat) at peace with not looking 100% like a model, 100% of the time.

I’m on holiday for two weeks, on the north coast of Northern Ireland. At the time of writing, I’ve been here for exactly one week, and it is wonderful. Of course it is. We all like holidays, don’t we? Because of the change of scene, obviously, but also because a holiday gives us a break from work. Now, I love my job, and historically, I’ve not been especially keen on holidays as a result. Not least because until I started self-producing, which created a passive income from re-sales of my videos, having a holiday meant that I stopped earning money. I really like money, so that’s tricky. However, as I’ve become a more experienced model, and as I’ve simultaneously aged, there is an aspect of my job that I do love having a break from. It’s the trying to be pretty.

Once upon a time, I didn’t have much skill when it came to hair and makeup, so trying to be pretty only took about twenty minutes a day at a maximum, and wasn’t especially successful. But I’ve learned, as time’s gone on. These days, trying-to-be-pretty-enough-for-work involves curling my hair overnight, dousing it with hairspray the next morning and styling the overnight curls in order to try to make them last all day. It includes applying a full face of makeup and fake eyelashes. There’s highlighting, and contouring, and three different shades of eyeshadow. Two different eyebrow products. It takes an hour a day, and honestly, it’s quite a lot of effort.

It’s definitely necessary, though. In the twenty four years that I’ve been modelling, standards across the industry have improved, and I don’t want to be left behind. But more importantly, when I turned thirty four, I started developing hyperpigmentation on my face. It’s a non-dangerous but massively inconvenient skin condition whereby patches of your skin become darker than others, and there’s not an awful lot you can do about it. It’s often caused (as is the case with me) by hormonal changes, so unless you’re prepared to mess around with your hormones in order to prioritise your skin’s appearance (I am not) you’re stuck with uneven skin tone until menopause, when it apparently quite often goes away. “But by then you’ll have wrinkles, so you won’t look any better” said my doctor, in an entertaining moment of tough love. All of this skin patchiness means light foundation is sadly no longer an option for me. If I want to look camera-ready, I need nice thick pancake-type makeup for full coverage. And to make that look good, let me tell you, takes quite a lot of time and skill. I don’t want to look like an actual pancake, so I have to be careful not to layer on too much, and to blend it carefully so it matches the colour of the rest of my body.

Once thick foundation is on, you have to be awfully careful. Putting on sunglasses, for example, or a hat, will rub a section of it off, which will be visible once you take the sunglasses/hat/ballgag/blindfold off again. You can transfer it to your fingers, to furniture, or to other people’s clothes if you fail to be vigilant. Consequently my laptop is roughly the same colour as my made-up face. It’s meant to be silver (the laptop, not my face), so that’s an indignity indeed for the poor little chap. His name is Edgelord53 for reasons that I cannot remember, and he probably doesn’t really want to be orange. That’s very likely why JellabubRises, my previous laptop, broke down in the end.

I suppose that once I finished filming each day, I could wash my makeup off, but having spent a goddam hour on it, I never do. It stays on (more or less) until bedtime, and this means that I go through life without most people ever seeing me without a full face of model makeup on, false eyelashes and all.

On holiday, the first few days are always rather challenging, because it’s quite tempting to continue with all the makeup, since that’s the version of me I expect to see when I look in the mirror. But doing it for an hour a day is a lot of work, and I have a vague sense that it might not be very mentally healthy to be dependant on cosmetics to this degree. What if I end up in prison, and am not allowed makeup? Or if my hands fall off and I can’t apply it any more? After months of being made up most of the time, I feel a bit sorry for all the people who I’ll meet in my unmade-up state. I worry that my bare, patchy face might traumatise them. I dread having people ask me what my job is when I’m not wearing makeup, too. I don’t want to tell the truth and see incredulity on their faces. Thank God for being an author as well — that’s much less anxiety-inducing to say. No one really seems to expect authors to wear eyeshadow and fake lashes every day, despite the courageous example that Dame Barbara Cartland set, for those of us who remember her.

But after an adjustment period (a week, in this case) I do start to recover my confidence in being holiday-ugly. My face is a bit patchy, but I like to imagine that it looks like mild sun damage, as though I was just home from building hospitals in Ghana, or something equally outdoorsy and philanthropic. I start to appreciate the pleasure of being able to leave the house only twenty minutes after waking up, and being able to rub my face all over my husband without having him complain. I mean, not really. He still complains, just not about my having squashed orange imprints of my face all over his t-shirts, and that’s nice. I wear walking clothes in colours that don’t really match — turquoise fleece, pink walking socks, black leggings, blue bandana, orange Rabb waterproof jacket. I braid my hair and wash it less frequently, giving it a break from hair dryers while my face takes a holiday from being covered in paste and powder.

I’m not sure if people treat me differently. Maybe they look at me a bit less. No one asks if I’m a model. No one asks what’s wrong with my skin. It’s absolutely fine. And best of all, by the time I go back to work, putting makeup on will have become novel again, and I’ll look forward to my hour a day of listening to podcasts while beautifying myself. Because a change is as good as a rest. Though actually, a rest has been very good too. I can recommend holidays, especially if you allow your beauty standards to have a little vacation too.