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Sleaze and sex appeal

Updated Thursday, July 19th 2012 at 00:00 GMT +3

The Ugly Duckling is a popular fairy tale written by Hans Christian Anderson.

Anderson was a Danish author famous for other classics among them The Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Clothes that are still popular references.

Ugly duckling is a story of transformation depicted by an unsightly little bird, despised by other barnyard animals and eventually matures into a beautiful swan.

This is the whole philosophy behind the makeover craze that rules the beauty industry. Plain Janes are transformed from ordinary girls with plain features into confident women oozing sex appeal.

What does it take? A quick trip to the beauty parlour, a stopover in the gym, high end shopping and voila! Overnight, ordinary Jane becomes sassy Jayne.

Therefore, when I turn on the TV or flip through magazine pages, all I see are ordinary girls who would sell their liver in exchange for sex appeal.

The beauty industry has convinced thousands of young girls that if they work on their sex appeal like Beyonce, they can all end up hooking up with a Jay Z and life would be grand thereafter.

Beauty is invariably tied to happiness. Beautiful people are caricatured as successful while ordinary folk are always portrayed as sad and desperate for help.

The problem is that a lot of what passes off as sex appeal is borderline sleazy and some women will paste make-up so liberally, they might as well be hookers.

In time, they get so hooked to this altered personality, like an actor on stage with fake hair, fake nails, fake skin tone, fake body enhancement, propped height they get lost in character.

So the tragedy of this scenario is that we are now beset with a parade of plain Janes who believe they are so hot and yet all we see is ordinary girls pleading desperately for attention.

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