Danskin, a US dancewear company with designer aspirations, released pictures of the new faces of its fitness clothing range last week. There's veteran supermodel Christie Brinkley (she of "Uptown Girl" fame) demonstrating effortless warm-up stretches at the age of 57. There's actress Jenny McCarthy, 38, executing impressive yoga contortions and chef Padma Lakshmi, 40, perspiring elegantly in a boxing ring. Last, here comes fresh-faced popstrel Hilary Duff, 23, jogging elegantly along a trail path. You go, multigenerational girls!
These pictures celebrate what we are supposed to regard as the new beauty: ageless, timeless, inclusive. It's always the same message. You can be gorgeous at any age. Live the dream. Just buy the right products and all this can be yours. Olympic standard fitness? Full make-up and perfectly blowdried hair, which remain immaculate both during and after your workout? Still hot in fishnets in your 50s? Why not? Never give up. Young or old, we're all beautiful!
But guess what? In the pictures the older women look exactly the same age as the youngest one. The only difference is in the facts of their ages, not their appearance, which in terms of their level of beauty is utterly homogenous. Basically, these are all women who have bathed in the gene pool of good fortune, drunk the elixir of youth and danced with the devil in the pale moonlight.
There is, to be fair, one single, solitary, noticeable wrinkle among them. It's on Brinkley's knee. Oh Christie, you're so… real! That's for authenticity, you know, because you wouldn't want to challenge your audience's suspension of disbelief, would you? Except they have tested our disbelief too far. And that's a good thing. Because no one falls for this stuff any more. There's a sense that the mendacious perfection narrative is becoming so extreme and overplayed that it's tired and dull. Surely, the Age of Ugly is approaching. Grimace and be proud.
It's high time. Last week I counted three mascara commercials during one TV ad break. These adverts all feature women with 56m eyelashes weighing down their eyelids so heavily they can barely see, let alone wink alluringly in the man-catching manner suggested. Small print on the screen always coyly reminds us that "some inserts may have been used". We all know this is code for: "The world's false eyelash supply was exhausted in the making of this advert." Why pretend?
The language of pentapeptides, cosmeceuticals and polysaccharide tensors (all genuine!) has always been exhausting. "What? No extract of jabberwocky?" But along with the supposedly diverse house models who all conform to exactly the same aesthetic whilst pretending to celebrate difference, the pseudo-science seems to have reached a saturation point. The beauty industry is eating itself (along with a helping of skin-plumping, free-radical-packed blueberries, we must hope). Unattractiveness industry, manifest yourself!
The problem is most of us are not that happy admitting we are not beautiful in every single way. Psychologies magazine recently published a Positive Beauty Manifesto, beginning: "Beauty is the celebration of what is unique about each one of us." But as Julie Burchill has responded, that's simply not true: we can't all be gorgeous and we shouldn't want to be. The relentless and pointless pursuit of beauty fuels insanity.
While Psychologies warns: "Being bombarded by unattainably perfect beauty ideals can damage confidence," Burchill counters: "Only if you are unspeakably wet." But here, thank goodness, is exactly where attitudes are, slowly, changing.
Several factors are making the suggestible among us (OK, mainly women) less pathetic in the face of advertising and celebrity perfection. Not least the increasing amount of commentary and advertising warning men of their physical inadequacies. The more this stuff proliferates, the better. It shows up what women have had to face for years: stupid, deranged, waste-of-time bitchery. There was a sneering report last week about singer Dannii Minogue's partner Kris Smith suffering "from a dreaded case of 'daddy tummy'". While claiming his midriff was "noticeably less defined", before-and-after photographs showed his six-pack looking almost identical to how it always looked. Many women commented online that they would like to see a great deal more detailed physical evidence in order to make a precise ruling.
And any way, who ever heard of the dreaded condition "commonly known as daddy tummy"? A traditional bout of food poisoning contracted by new fathers after eating a dodgy takeaway on the way home from the labour ward? Or maybe just the sick feeling in a man's stomach when he realises that he is about to become subject to the same scrutiny women have faced for years?
It really helps to see this demented, schadenfreude-steeped logic applied to a man: "Look! He's let himself go!" If anyone has any tendency to indulge in these stories when they relate to women, they should try turning that gaze on a man. It feels instantly lazy, bullying, nit-picking and sad. The ultimate beauty myth-buster is a poster that has recently popped up on the London underground. It features a grinning young man proudly puffing out a sleek chest. He is smiling because surgery has helped him conquer an unsightly and embarrassing condition: prominent man breasts. Yes, granted, in exceptionally rare cases moobs might conceivably be a medical condition. But in most instances they're no more a deformity than love handles or cellulite. They are just a manifestation of everyday porkiness, no more and no less. But again, let's welcome the spread of moob paranoia. Because it opens people's eyes to the scale of the delusion. Which might stop its spread. (Let us not stop the spread of actual moobs. For, with their quiver and their droop, they are a noble testament to human frailty.)
What's astonishing and fascinating is how tolerance fits into all this. The rise of political correctness means it is no longer acceptable to ridicule people with life-affecting physical flaws or anomalies. And yet when it comes to the ordinary, standard-issue human body, as a culture we have never been less tolerant of ageing, unattractiveness or the tiniest of physical differences.
No longer! Anything that stops us from taking the magnifying glass of self-loathing to our unavoidable faults must be encouraged. Because while we all still have eyes and a sex drive, we'll never stop the march of the beautiful. But we can learn – and we are learning – not to be adversely affected by it. Embrace the grotesque. Celebrate true, ugly diversity, in all its most hideous manifestations born far away from the moonlit devil-dancing. And give a moob a loving squeeze today.