Fabulous Somebody

A writer retreats

2009-12-12T09:22:00.003+11:00

It is April and I am on an Amtrak train speeding along the east bank of the Hudson River towards the town of Hudson, Columbia County, in New York state about two hours north of New York City.

Four hundred years before me, in 1609, the British explorer Henry Hudson became the first European to sail up the 500km river on a quest for the Dutch East India Company. Even though he failed to return to Holland with the spices he sought, his name has forever been associated with the wide river, the city and the beautiful valley that contains it. It is something of a shock, so close to the big city, to sway past wetlands dotted with ibis and the romantic ruin of a fairytale castle on an island just off shore.

Thanks to a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, I am headed for a residency at Ledig House, a writers' colony set on 121ha of park and woodland about a 20-minute drive from Hudson. I am to be given free bed and board and perfect peace to work on my latest novel, thanks to the non-profit organisation that runs the colony... read more about my adventures at Ledig House here.

Sarah Murdoch

2009-11-04T07:19:00.002+11:00

My article on Sarah Murdoch in this month's Australian Women's Weekly is causing lots of comment. Sarah told me she'd like to go un-Photoshopped and the resultant cover - smile lines and all - is getting mostly positive, sometimes ecstatic, mail from readers. A few comments along the lines of 'she's young and rich and beautiful anyway so what's the fuss?' have lobbed onto the Weekly's website but generally people are relieved that one magazine has taken a stand against the plastication of beauty. I call it Death by Photoshop - the digital technicians seem hell bent on erasing a subject's whole personality and individuality along with the wrinkles and 'flaws'. It is a kind of death. And it makes the photographers lazy. No one, it seems, knows how to light anymore.

A cruise to somewhere past the bridge to nowhere

2008-10-26T10:19:00.007+11:00

Way before any of us had heard of Mooselini, I took a cruise to Alaska on the magnificent Silver Shadow and wrote about it for Wish magazine published in The Australian newspaper on October 3. Here's the first paragraph. For the remainder of the story go here.

"It is approaching midnight off the coast of Alaska and the sun has not yet quite set. Less than a kilometre away, the coastline is a torn loaf of bread, spilling small, densely forested islands, like broken-off crumbs into the sea. I lean on the railing of my midship terrace, breathing in the crystal air, mesmerised by the waves that ripple away from the ship as it glides along. I have just consumed a five-course meal with matching wines, but if ever an occasion calls for another glass of champagne, it’s this one."

The Fey Mrs Palin

2008-09-30T08:30:00.004+10:00

Pity poor Hillary. (Sort of). Like most female politicians she has struggled over the years to look crisp and serious in the way she dresses for public appearances. Hence those pants suits - businesslike whilst not being butch, and ever-so-slightly suggesting the female form in sky blues and yellows that aren't gender-specific. It's a tricky act to pull off, especially as the scrutiny is blistering, in a way that it still isn't for her male colleagues (unless they're handsome black men). Look too feminine, the argument goes, and you'll be taken as soft. And then comes along Sarah Palin, flashing shapely legs and a tousled, come-hither hairdo, and suddenly paens are being written to her gorgeousness. And, the first heady week, at least, she's being taken seriously! The pit bull with lipstick! The Barbie with balls!

Here's the thing. Sarah Palin's style is pitch-perfect for a female politician. Modern but retro; instanly recognisable as her own. I'm frankly sick to death of those pants suits, on Hillary or anyone else. One might argue that sex appeal has no place in the political chamber. But I disagree. Politicians spend an inordinant amount of time regulating our sexual and procreational behaviour, so why should women kit up as if they're entering a nunnery? If you've ever sat in on a parliamentary or congressional session, you'll note how much it is about pumped-up, testosterone-stimulating male posturing. A few female hormones released into the air is simply redressing the balance. Unsex me now, said Lady Macbeth and, sadly, female politicans, with a couple of notable exceptions (Cicciolina comes to mind) have been taking her advice ever since.

In Australia, we have Julie Bishop, Deputy Opposition Leader, a tiny-waisted blonde with enormous cross-eyed baby blues and a penchant for florals, who is the wet dream of every right-leaning male in the country. It seems to me no one has taken her to task for the occassional glimpse of expensive lingerie peaking out from her substantial cleavage or the excessive attention to getting the flip of her frosted locks immaculately correct. (And why should they?) And yet, our Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, has copped a regular serve, as they say, about the perigrinations of her own flamboyant red hairdo.

So, here's the other thing. Feminine and sexy is a strength if you're on the right side of the House, but if you're on the left, it's a weakness. Somewhere in there lies the hoary (or whore-y) old chestnut about strong women being unfeminine - as if you can't be pretty and a feminist too (or right-wing and a feminist for that matter). But maybe the glass ceiling is in fact a glass mirror. I'm sure the inner girl in Hillary would love to wear a figure-flattering frock sometimes, but she's been put on the Pants Suit Express by her stylists and there's no getting off.

Rather than being a sexist issue, I think it's an intra-sex issue. Women are making these judgements about each other as much as men are. It works against men too. Obama is getting flack for being too elegant, too body and health-conscious, vain even. Cranky and crumpled McCain was trumpeted as the Alpha Dog after the first debate. Not because he spent the debate talking over the top of Obama, but because Barry was calm and unruffled and piss elegant. A bit suspiciously poofy, don't you think? And poofy equates to weak.

If more female politicans had frocked up, Sarah Palin would not have seen so unusually attractive to John McCain and the Republican Viagra-chomping set. McCain wouldsn't have exposed himself as desperate and we wouldn't have had Tina Fey... OK, I take it back.

Footnote: This just in from Joan Walsh at salon.com: "(there is) a recent outbreak of misplaced Palin pity among liberals – the New York Times' Judith Warner, the Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, the New Republic's Christopher Orr have all expressed sympathy for the sinking VP nominee. I'm with Traister; I'm not feeling it. Palin "didn't blink" when McCain asked her to join the ticket, didn't think twice, because she's a supremely self-confident woman with a limited worldview, impressed with her own greatness and not terribly curious about anyone else. She reaps what she sows. I'm with conservative Kathleen Parker and Zakaria: I believe Palin would be a menace as commander in chief, and she's got to get off the GOP ticket."

Duck a la horreur

2008-08-21T15:41:00.003+10:00

SO pleased to see Paul Collins' appreciation of Vincent Price's cookbook A Treasury of Great Recipes in today's Slate. I have had the great pleasure of owning a copy of this book for years. Not quite since 1965, when it first was published, but probably since some time in the '80s, when I suppose I picked it up from one of those street hawkers at Cooper Union in New York's East Village. It's a gem and suggest you trawl online second hand booksellers for your very own copy. While Vincent and his wife Mary were true gourmands and the book is a very serious encyclopaedia of recipes from the world's best restaurants, there is a sense of the sardonic running through the pages. Here is part of the chef's own recipe for pressed duck at Paris' famous Tour d'Argent: "The duck used for this recipe must be very young (8 weeks), fattened the last 15 days. They kill this bird by suffocation (strangling) in order to keep all it's blood. (Author's note: This begins to sound as though the Tour d'Argent chef writes my movie scripts!)"

More lobbying

2008-07-29T09:09:00.004+10:00

I wrote about my fascination for hotel lobbies for Australian Gourmet Traveller in June:

Wish you were here – but not too many of you, as there’s not much room on this brocade couch. I’m sitting in the lobby of the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, researching my new novel, The Woman in the Lobby, which is the dark, erotic story of an Australian woman who finds herself stranded in Paris and survives by picking up rich men in hotel lobbies. During the course of writing this book, I found it necessary to travel the world to check out locations and observe the kinds of things that go on in the lobbies of luxury hotels, which are not only places of transition but often the marketplace for subtle social and sexual liaisons. The research led me to New York, LA, Biarritz, San Sebastian, Monte Carlo, St-Tropez, Cannes, the Maldives, Hong Kong, Beijing, Bucharest, Dubai – and Paris, where I am now, sitting in my favourite lobby, which is not only exquisitely elegant but full of intriguing people.

I’ve always loved hotel lobbies, ever since the time, as young teenager, I waited for hours in the lobby of the Southern Cross in Melbourne for a glimpse of Cat Stevens. I learnt then that patience is a virtue and that sitting still in places where people come and go often reaps the most interesting rewards – even if it is the two-second thrill of seeing the pop star you are in love with as a pair of elevator doors swallow him up. A friend of mine struck up a friendship with Robert Redford in a Monte Carlo lobby and I know an attractive Sydney woman who, recently holidaying in St-Tropez with a girlfriend, was approached by two Qatari sheiks in the lobby of her hotel in St-Tropez and invited to go to Egypt for a party – on the brothers’ private jet. This kind of thing has never happened to me, although I have had a few hopeful teas at the Ritz in London.

Ask anyone you know, and they will have a story to tell about a hotel lobby. Why? Because it can be a stage where you play out your fantasies – or you collide with strangers playing out theirs. As one of my characters says of hotels, “It’s as if we give them a key, not to a room, but to another life altogether. ” The lobby is the first act.

Even if I’m not staying in the swishest of accommodations, I like to dress up and find a suitably interesting lobby to while away a few hours, to “borrow” its glamour for a bit. I prefer the slightly decadent ambience of the European hotels, although the Peninsula in Hong Kong gives them all a good run for their money. I like a comfortable chair and attendants who are unconcerned if you stay all day. They’re very sweet in the Crillon and the crowd that stays here is arty and diverse. I never tire of the little dramas that materialise all day. And if I do, this is Paris. There’s always the George V or the Plaza Athénée.

Spah Spah Spah

2008-06-09T15:20:00.003+10:00

My final column in the (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines appeared in April. Here is an edited exerpt:

At the new Chi spa village in the Shangri-La resort at Yanuca, Fiji Islands, they offer a “Dusk till Dawn” spa ritual, where you are guided gently, like a small child, to an ocean front villa, bathed, scrubbed, polished, massaged, fed sushi and chocolates, put into a king-sized bed with the TV remote control (or your partner, as the treatment is available for couples) and then woken at sunrise with breakfast and a facial. As spa experiences go, this is one of the best. But for years, this popular resort offered only basic massages in simple huts on the beach, which was considered the height of bliss. Trouble is, these days, we’re all so darn spoiled that bliss is not enough.

As I was wallowing in my warm bath at the Chi village, watching the sunset, peeling myself a grape, with frangipani blossoms floating all around me, I wondered about this spa thing. Where once hotels attracted clientele with state-of-the-art gyms and heated swimming pools, now they need to build a whole village on a Cecil B. DeMille scale, complete with open air showers and spa pools, fragrant steam rooms, ocean views, lush gardens, therapists trained in the latest Asian healing philosophies, relaxation pavilions, water features, temple-like ambience and products made from plants plucked from the highest reaches of the Himalayas.

A venerable hotel like the Peninsula in Hong Kong devotes a floor of prime real estate to its new Espa, which includes a waiting room where Chinese tea ceremonies are performed, a crystal steam room where lavender-infused air hisses like dragon’s breath from a giant chunk of pink crystal, treatment suites with magnificent views over the harbour and a shower that deluges you with rainforest-temperature water under changing mood lights. Australian Tom McLoughlin, owner of the intimate Huvafen Fushi resort in the Maldives, spends a small fortune sinking his treatment rooms into the coral reef, requiring a mad-genius feat of engineering, so that the experience is like lying in an aquarium, only the fish are swimming around you. The stakes are high. Not having a completely gorgeous spa in a luxury hotel is now as bad as not having clean towels.

Spa. Spa. Spa. We even demand spas in airports these days. And the concept of the “day spa,” an American term for what is basically a beauty parlour with “wet” rooms to allow for scrubs, wraps, Vichy showers and the like, has taken hold here. There are day spas everywhere, full of women (and men) lying on tables slathered in algae, wrapped in foil blankets like roasting chickens or squirming under a sheet of hot rocks heated up in a crock-pot. When you think about it, it’s quite absurd how far we all go to indulge our senses, relax our bodies or neutralise our worries. Is the world outside, beyond the reaches of the Enya soundtrack, so terrible?

It must be, if you consider how busy these places are. For a surprising number of women an appointment at the spa – for a facial or a spray-tan or perhaps a pedicure - is as regular as putting the garbage out. The big travel trend is for girlfriends to holiday together in wellness retreats, such as Chiva-Som in Thailand, for a few days of detoxing. No one really needs any of this, although I’m the first to argue for the benefits of regular massage. The culture tells us we “deserve” to be pampered. Fair enough. But what happens to our spa habit when the economy goes south? Back to egg white facemasks in the bathroom at home? Begging a neck rub from the boyfriend while he watches TV? Or will we live on air and pedicures?

Just asking.

Book Launch

2008-05-13T16:50:00.008+10:00

Courtesy of Robert Rosen, Australia's No 1 (and nicest) snaparazzo, here are a few shots from the launch of The Woman in the Lobby, held (naturally) in the sexy, candle-lit lobby of the Blue Hotel, Sydney. Even though he lives at the end of the wharf next door to the hotel (and in fact wandered by during the evening) we didn't ask Russell Crowe to launch the book, given his reputation with hotel desk clerks and telephones.

High Flying

2008-05-12T08:23:00.003+10:00

In Friday's Melbourne Herald-Sun, an article on where High Flyers (like me) like to take their vacations... check it out here.

Lobbying about

2008-05-12T08:14:00.002+10:00

I can't put my finger on the moment I developed a passion for hotel lobbies but I suspect it was fuelled by my teenage obsession with Hollywood movies of the 1930s, particularly those of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, or Carole Lombard, which invariably featured scenes set in the grand lobbies of hotels such as New York's Waldorf Astoria. Not surprising, then, that when I first went to New York in 1983 and walked into the lobby of the Plaza Hotel, where I was soon ensconced in a magnificent suite, I felt instantly as if I had come home...

Read all my article on hotel lobbies in The Traveller section of The Age.

The seedier side of glamour

2008-04-25T09:23:00.003+10:00

Thank you, Girl with a Satchel, for your review of The Woman in the Lobby in this week's blog. "A vivid, captivating, sophisticated look at the seedier side of the ‘glamour’ life, which will make you appreciate the normality of your own. Definitely for grown-ups only. "

Booked Up

2008-04-19T09:53:00.006+10:00

The following interview with me appears in the May issue of Vogue Australia:

Lee Tulloch's new book, The Woman in the Lobby (Penguin, $32.95), tracks Violet Armengard, a redhead with a penchant for champagne and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, as she lies in wait...

What inspired you to write the story?
"Years ago I was in Paris covering the shows for Vogue Australia and I was approached in a restaurant by an Italian woman who wanted to know if I would accompnay her gentleman friend to Capri for the weekend. He was much older than me, with white hair and an eye patch, clearly quite rich and very dashing. I said no, but I always wondered: 'What if?' On my travels, I've often found myself sitting in glamorous hotel lobbies watching the fascinating social interaction that goes on. I observed quite a few gigolos and prostitutes trying to hook a rich man or woman. Women do become the mistresses of the men they meet in bars and hotels. And there's a real culture of this if you loook for it- women who are the 'travelling companions' of rich men. I wondered, what kind of mental leap does it take to sleep with an older or ugly man for his money? And is there necessarily anything wrong with it?
How easy is it to write an erotic scene?
"Extremely difficult. It can take me weeks to write one erotic interlude. The trick is finding the right words, so that the prose isn't too prudish - or too crude."
Have you ever met women like Violet?
"I wanted Violet to be someone we all could relate to - an ordinary Australian woman who abandons her middle-class morality to pursue rich men. She has typical insecurities about her physical and sexual self and tries to find her identity through men."

The Screaming Mimis

2008-04-08T07:45:00.004+10:00

I wrote about Omnilux Light Therapy in the April issue of the (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines:

I steer well clear of the armoury of needles, scalpels, lasers and other appliances that the cosmetic services industry deploys these days in its relentless war on the terror of aging. Going to the dentist is bad enough; I can’t for the life of me imagine why one would willingly pay for pain.

I’m suspicious of anyone touting the latest “weapon”. I’m a Pacifist, in all things, including beauty. I’m not impressed with the rules of engagement. An acquaintance had fifty years of freckles removed from her arms using IPL (Intense Pulsed Light) treatment. While she’s pleased with result, she admits it felt like hundreds of burning cigarettes being pushed into her arms. Some people enjoy being human ashtrays (James Dean most famously) but I don’t share that particular fetish. A therapist assured me IPL wasn’t more painful than having elastic bands lightly flicked over my face. And that’s a selling point? So I have chosen to go AWOL on the matter of IPL. I have learned to love my freckles.

When couple of friends raved about Omnilux Revive light therapy, I resisted trying it for a very long time, dubious about claims that it is non-invasive and pain free. In fact, I had to be virtually taken hostage to road test it. The Omnilux system was developed in Britain as a non-surgical light therapy to treat skin cancer, but soon its benefits for a variety of other skin conditions – such as acne and photo aging – became evident. The machine uses a head that emits thousands of LEDs (light emitting diodes) that do not contain harmful UVA, UVB or infrared radiation. With Omnilux Revive a brilliant red light is used on aging skin, reaching below the epidermis to give a deeper massage than possible with the human hands, stimulating the body’s own collagen to refresh the skin and reduce those pesky “visible signs of aging.” The Omnilux Blue for acne-prone conditions uses, unsurprisingly, a blue light, which stabilises three of the triggers for acne – excess sebum production, inflammation and the growth of bacteria. The twenty-minute treatment is usually paired with a brief salon facial. A course of nine or ten sessions under the lamp, three or four days apart, is generally recommended.

This is how it works: you lie on a bed and a lamp is placed about 10 cm above your head. Goggles are provided although I am assured the light does not damage the eyes. The first red light as the lamp warms up is not so bad. But then the full lamp is turned on and it’s not only bright, it’s so bright, screamingly bright, that you want to close your eyes – but, of course, they are already closed. There’s no escape, the big red blob invades your brain. In my case, I feel like Malcolm McDowell in the torture scene in A Clockwork Orange. I try not to panic and the therapist gives me a hand massage to distract me. The colours soon turn searing yellow and orange and hot pink, like the acid trip I never had as a teenager. It takes all my strength of will not to beg for it to be turned off.

As freaky as this is, there’s no pain factor. In subsequent visits my eyes become more accustomed to the brightness and I actually start to enjoy it. I’m told that many people fall asleep under the lamp and come away with mood uplifted. I find this impossible, but half way through the program I am beginning to see quite definite improvement in the luminosity, firmness and hydration of my skin, especially on my décolletage, which is the most sun-damaged. The full benefits are not experienced until the months after treatment so, as I write this, it’s too soon to tell whether the recommended outlay of around $900 for a 10-session course, taken annually, is worth it (shop around - some salons offer special deals). But that’s less than a series of facials and I like the fact that it’s your own cells doing the repair work. It’s almost natural – less a Star Wars weapon than a little nudge from Mother Earth.

Jim Clark's Australian Honey

2008-03-26T08:49:00.005+11:00

In the Australian Women's Weekly this month, my interview with supermodel Kristy Hinze about her relationship with Netscape founder Jim Clark. Here's a sample:

When the story broke that Jim Clark’s Australian “honey” was Kristy Hinze, there was the usual cynicism about a thrice-married billionaire hooking up with a gorgeous, younger model. (He is now 63 and she is 28). His divorce from third wife Nancy had cost him a $US125 million settlement, and had been all over the papers. Plus Clark was no ordinary billionaire. The subject of a recent book, The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis, he is an undoubted genius who has redefined American culture, from the high-tech movies of Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas to the way we get our information and do our shopping.

“At first sight he looks avuncular, with thinning white hair, wire-rimmed spectacles and a lovely smile,” writes John Naughton. “Behind the amiable façade is the nearest thing Silicon Valley has to a force of nature, an ungovernable, relentless, mercurial, capricious, inventive character who transformed the computing industry, spawned the internet boom and eats bankers for breakfast.”

I read this quote to Kristy as we’re sitting in the courtyard of her Sydney hotel. She is en route to Melbourne, where she is taking part in the Melbourne Fashion Festival in her role as brand ambassador to iconic fashion label Sportscraft and for pre-production on Australia’s version of the fashion reality show Project Runway, which she will host and which starts shooting in April. Golden-haired and golden-skinned, with those amazing green sloe eyes, she’s very much a goddess, even in jeans and white shirt - but a very earthy one, with her throaty laugh and pragmatic view of the world. “That’s Jim!” she laughs when I finish reading the quote. “It’s perfect. He is relentless and ungovernable, for sure! That’s what makes him so amazing.”

She has been reluctant to talk about her private life in the past but today she seems very relaxed about it and happy to sing the praises of “my boyfriend,” as she calls him. “I never thought I was going to date an older man when I first met him,” she says. “I wasn’t chasing him by any means. For me it was different to hang out with someone with something to say that was so interesting and important and who was really, truly incredibly intelligent.” Besides, she adds, “He’s handsome and he’s got so much charisma and he’s so funny. He’s very normal and down to earth. He’s an incredible man and I just love him.”

Something in the Water

2008-03-07T17:32:00.004+11:00

The Lake House in Daylesford, Victoria, repeatedly gets awarded Australia's best country hotel. And the mineral spring at its front door is pretty invigorating too... Daylesford is my idea of a perfect country town. Read about taking the waters in this picturesque part of Australia in travel my story in The Australian magazine, published last weekend.

Not the kitten heel... the kitten head

2008-03-01T09:48:00.004+11:00

From my Deeply Superficial column in the March (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines:

Twice in my life I’ve fallen foul of the haircutter’s scissors and found myself sitting nervously in a salon chair as I watch my long hair being slashed to half an inch of its life. I’m sure that I was a Weimar Republic cabaret artist in another life and the urge to chop the locks into a Liza Minnelli-as-Sally Bowles bob (foolish for a blonde) becomes irrepressible sometimes. Hairdressers are amazingly quick to pounce on their clients’ identity crises and so I have twice ended up with horror cuts that, far from accentuating my divine decadence, made me look like a refugee from a bingo hall. I think we have all been there.

Let me say at this point, lest my hairdresser of 25 years gets upset, that these two occasions were outside his jurisdiction. These days, whenever I feel like a radical change – that is, short hair - he just rolls his eyes and refuses to budge. Bless him. But, fortunately, in 2008, if I do ever find myself succumbing to a brain short-circuit and demanding a Liza Minnelli, I can always call on Jessica Simpson to reverse the damage.

Hair extensions have always seemed to me rather terrifying. The type that is glued and bonded to the hair surely can’t be good for it. And the weaves, which are preferable, always remind me of a balding doll I had as a child and the way her hair was brutally stitched into her plastic scalp. But I suppose, if I try very hard, I can see the attraction in it, especially for women (let’s not even think about the men) with thin hair or those who need an Instant Rapunzel for a wedding or big night out. No one wants to wait for anything these days, let alone five years for hair to grow, so two or three hours in a salon chair reading international Vogues and sipping sparkling water seems like a breeze.

In an unfamiliar salon the other week I was shocked to see the number of chairs filled with young women having extensions sewn in. Each of them glowed with the bright wattage that comes from feeling sexy about their new look. But I couldn’t help feeling there was something creepy about it, just as I find nail extensions creepy. Occasionally, I have been sent clip-on hair extensions to try, such as those from Diva, and they’re all very clever, but ultimately they lie around the house, unused, like golden, baby ferrets.

So when the invitation came to have a HairDo™ salon clip-on extension from Jessica Simpson (you mean all that blonde hair is not hers?) cut and fitted by Anthony Nader at Sydney’s Raw, I thought I should open my mind and take up the offer. After all, unlike the permanent extensions, I could always just take it out.

In fact, the 21-inch long, 100% human hair extension is exceptionally easy to clip on and clip off. Initially, you need to purchase it from a salon, select the colour from 13 options and have the piece shaped to blend with your own hair. It’s all extremely simple – the long hair is woven onto one form, rather like a wig, and once you make a section through your hair and pin the length up, it attaches with seven very secure clips. The natural hair blends well and in theory it looks completely natural.

But here’s the thing, and maybe it’s just me – it doesn’t feel completely natural. It’s lightweight and yet my own hair, pinned in a bun underneath, felt lumpy under the fall. It was as if a small kitten had attached itself to the back of my scalp and wouldn’t let go. On top of that, a monsoonal rain came down as I left the salon and it felt like a very damp kitten had attached itself to me. It itched. I couldn’t wait to get home and get it off.

I willing to accept that for someone with fine or short hair these things are godsends, but for me the extension has become another abandoned critter in my bathroom menagerie.

Bad Geisha

2008-01-24T16:27:00.000+11:00

In the Australian Women's Weekly, on sale today, my exclusive feature on the first foreign woman to officially debut as a geisha in Japan, Fiona Graham, now known as "Sayuki". Here is an extract:

Sayuki is the lowest geisha on the totem pole, so she has to sit in on the classes the other geisha are taking before it is her turn. “Most young Japanese would not be able to adapt. It’s very hard to be in that hierarchical world and to be the newest member.” Geisha take classes in dancing and music all their lives and for the new geisha it’s very labour-intensive. Sayuki jokes about her lack of skills. “I’m a very bad geisha.” Today’s classes go for four hours. Sayuki does seem on tenterhooks in her deference to the others. When I ask her what has been the hardest thing about learning to be a geisha, she says sitting for hours on her knees (she has had to lose several kilos to ease the pressure) and wearing black contact lenses. “The black wig looks wrong with pale eyes,” she says. In effect, with the thick white makeup, wig and contact lenses you would not know she was Western. Except, she says, for her Japanese. She speaks in the small, little-girl voice of the Japanese, but apparently, even though it is excellent for everyday life, it’s not perfect enough for geisha.

Giving whimsy

2007-12-06T09:18:00.000+11:00

The following is the text of December Deeply Superficial, published in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I loathe Christmas in Australia. There, I’ve said it. The sticks of trees that are supposed to be firs, the pathetic bits of tinsel hung from city lamp posts, the fly-blown hams on the picnic table, the frenetic socialising because – God help us – we’ll never see anyone again come Boxing Day, and the all the whingeing about precisely these things that occupies our conversations from the first reminder, usually in September, that it’s only so-and-so-many sleeps until Santa comes.

When I lived in the northern hemisphere, Christmas seemed to make sense. It may have been just as commercial, but the roasting chestnuts, the real, chunky fir trees, the egg nog, the ice skating, the corpulent Santas on every corner and the splendid street decorations at least lent a whiff of occasion to a festival that seems more and more divorced from its origins.

I only have step foot into my local shopping mall, a hive of stressed-out worker bees armed with shopping lists and credit cards, to sink into a deep depression. The obligation to blow the family’s budget on presents you know the recipient is not going to like – and to spend precious summer weekends doing it when it’s more fun to shop at leisure - takes all the joy out of giving, which I firmly believe should be spontaneous throughout the year. And then there’s the nagging guilt each and everyone of us carries (or should carry) that there are many, many unfortunate people out there that would love those Simpsons shorts that make cousin Bjorn screw up his nose.

I have known parents who make a point of denying little Eustace the iPod Nano and donating the money instead to a worthy cause, but these bold souls are rare and, in this über-materialistic society, considered a bit mean. The kiddies have to have their dozens of presents, don’t they? Tellingly, if you ask social welfare agencies who are the people who give the most at this time, it’s usually people from the lower economic stratas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with gift giving and receiving. In fact, generosity is something to cherish. But if it’s the thought that counts, then gifts bought begrudgingly and received ungratefully are not worth the plastic that they’ve been bought with. Better to purchase a gift for an anonymous deserving stranger and pop it under the Target Christmas tree.

Some of us have too much stuff and others don’t have enough and Christmas might be a chance to redress the balance. It doesn’t mean being a bad capitalist. It certainly wouldn’t hurt the economy if every single person bought an extra gift for an underprivileged stranger. And it need not – probably should not – be something practical. A friend of mine says she worries about donating beauty products like fragrance to homeless women because she knows there is so much more they do need. But I don’t agree. It’s sometimes the whimsical things that people doing it tough miss.

Quietly, the beauty industry is very generous in donating products and funds to charitable organizations, through initiatives such as Look Good Feel Better, a free service which helps women diagnosed with cancer deal with the distressing physical side effects of chemotherapy and radiation by providing products, wigs and makeup workshops. While some might argue that women’s self-esteem shouldn’t depend on makeup – it shouldn’t – you can’t write off the importance of looking and feeling physically attractive in our society. It’s not just the provenance of well-to-do women.

Think of a woman in a refuge who has left her home behind and all of her clothes and her personal items or a woman living in a shelter who needs to be well groomed for a job interview. Would she not love something from Yves Saint Laurent, Chanel or Dior? (Or Origins, Jurlique, Jo Malone…I could go on.) And what she might like best is that another woman chose it for her.

You know what to do. Merry Christmas.

A bit of a pouf

2007-11-14T08:54:00.000+11:00

The following is the text of November's Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines:

The idea of putting powder on your face seems strangely anachronistic these days, especially with the advent of mattifying foundations that make the need for blotting shine redundant. I like a bit of a pouf, so it always seems to me that we have lost something in not having a dressing table of marabou-feathered powder puffs at our disposal.

But a kind of revolution has happened with powders. It was only last May, when visiting New York, that a makeup artist friend suggested I dropped into the Sephora emporium for a jar of i.d. bareMinerals powder by Bare Essentials, which she thought among the best. I did and I was hooked. The tiniest bit of powder, when lightly and rather carelessly applied with a brush and then worked into my skin gave surprisingly good coverage, evened out my skintone and delivered the kind of glow you see on the cheeks of Hollywood starlets when they’re let out of rehab.

Just like those television commercials and the gushing endorsements of TVSN spokesmodels, mineralising powders work well and they work fast – and seem to suit every face from Gladwrap-smooth teenagers to expression-filled grannies. Because the best of the mineralising products are totally free of harsh chemicals, fillers, talc, preservatives and fragrances, they’re recommended for women with skin conditions such as rosacea and also for women who have undergone cosmetic procedures. Unlike talc, the powder does not settle into wrinkles or cake-up your complexion.

Just about every mainstream brand has a mineralising foundation these days, from L’Oreal’s Bare Naturale to Almay’s handy Pure Blends with a built-in brush and M.A.C.’s Skinfinish range. Dermatologists sell them to their clients and you can also find cruelty-free and vegan brands in the health food stores. It’s worth investigating these latter options. One brand I’m now using is Inika, founded by Sydney women Miranda Bond and Jenni Williams, who began the Thriving Healthy Women Network that specialises in women’s nutrition hormones and toxic-free living. The range of colours in the foundations and bronzers is excellent, as are the dazzling eyeshadow colours, and it’s all pure and ethical - and a speck of it goes a long way, as I discovered after dusting my clothes in it at my first, too-vigorous attempt. The $54.95 jar probably will last so long it will need to be carbon-dated one day.

Now I’ve got the swing of mineralisers, I’ve discovered something potentially more wonderful. Sydney makeup artist Karen Playel has brought to Australia the ERA spray makeup range from California, which includes foundations, bronzers and primers. This is a hypo-allergenic, water-based foundation in a can with an SPF factor of 20, which replicates a professional airbrush application and is almost foolproof. Really.

I’m a bit of a fool, believe me, and I was very dubious about this, but a quick two-second spritz of this product over my face, a minute for it to dry off, a bit of a pat down with a powder puff to remove excess moisture – and, voila, a flawless, light finish that can be as natural or as photo-ready as you like. You can spray a small amount into the palm of your hand first and then dab it where you need more coverage. And you don’t need to clean it off your eyelashes as it makes a great base for mascara. It’s long-lasting, waterproof, suitable for face and body and is recommended for those undergoing IPL or Microdermabrasion treatments because it is sterile. People with pigmentation, vitiligo, scarring, birthmarks, tatoos or rosacea will find it a boon.

I admit I was a bit terrified to use it at first, and still find it’s best to tuck my hair under a plastic showercap before I spray, but it only takes one or two goes to become adept. This is the stuff that’s used on Hollywood film sets. Mere mortals can buy the product ($74) off the website, which has an auto-match service that matches the foundation you are using to ERA colours.

The four-minute mile, the three-minute egg – and now the two-second makeup. O, brave new world!

Lobbying around

2007-10-19T08:08:00.001+10:00

Well, The Woman in the Lobby is finished. Off to the printers. And I've been lobbying around Europe, checking out the best hotel lobbies. Some favourites: the Hotel de Crillon in Paris (great crowd); The Regina, Paris (great slightly seedy ambiance); The George V, Paris (completely OTT filthy rich clientele); The Gresham Palace in Budapest (astonishing restored art nouveau interior, left); and the Pariz in Prague (small, lovely and atmospheric.) Next week, I'm off to Beijing and Shangai to seek Chinese hotel decadence, courtesy of the Shangri-La group. Stay tuned.

The Devil's Bargain

2007-10-19T07:34:00.000+10:00

Here's my latest Deeply Superficial column as it appeared in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

Another day, another $400 face cream. The luxury end of the skin care market is so expensive now that when I was checking the price of a 50 ml jar of Chanel’s quite indulgent Précision Sublimage Essential Regenerating Cream for this column and discovered that it cost a modest $420, I thought, Wow! That’s almost a bargain!

Consider the big players in the luxury market. La Prairie’s Skin Caviar Luxe Cream is $560 for 50 ml. (Luxe Eye Lift Cream, $460). SK-II’s Ultimate Revival Cream from its prestige LXP range is $450. Lancome’s Secret de Vie Eye Cream will set you back $415. A 60 ml jar of Crème de la Mer is $440 and the Lifting Serum with Intensifier is $635. La Crème Parfaite, from legendary Parisian beauty house Carita, retails at $748 for 50 ml (available through the Crown Spa in Melbourne at crownspa@crowntowers.com.au). And Estée Lauder’s Re-Nutrive Re-Creation 24-hour system retails for $1320 for the Night Crème and Day Crème together, or $690 for each 50 ml jar.

So when a black lacquer box that housed Giorgio Armani’s new Crema Nera moisturiser arrived, call me psychic, but I just knew it would cost the magic $400-plus. (It’s $420 for 50 ml or $460 for the Ritual Coffret, which includes a polished black obsidian stone to massage the melting cream into the skin.) What is essentially different about the Armani product is that it is suitable for all skin types and ages, whereas the other pricey creams mostly target ageing skin, when the need for a more intense treatment to combat dehydration and hormonal balances becomes more essential and, dare I say it, when our insecurities about what we see in the mirror are likely to be more pronounced.

The costs of the products, according to the marketers, reflect the huge investment in science (discoveries which later filter down to the cheaper brands) and, more pertinently, the price of sourcing. For instance, the brief to Estée Lauder’s chief scientist Dr. Daniel Maes when he was formulating Re-Creation was to use “the best of the best.” That includes 74 vital trace minerals, a sea plant extract called Padma and a mechanism to provide the skin with a more effective way of utilising essential calcium reserves.

What’s more, with many of these products, you don’t just get the ingredients, but a romantic story that makes the cream seem even more precious. Mr. Armani, for instance, has a holiday home on the island of Pantella in the Mediterranean, famous for its thermal mud baths, which heal skin problems. Lying in his mineral bath one day, he wondered if the obsidian hidden in the volcano, a natural mineral known for its wellness powers and positive energy, could be adapted to a skincare line. With the scientists of L’Oréal on hand, the white powder made from the black stone was harnessed into an unusual solid cream, Crema Nera, which melts when it meets the warmth of the skin.

This is either gobbledygook or fascinating, depending on what kind of money you’re prepared to spend on your face. When I canvas other women about this, there are some who find it inconceivable to contemplate spending $400 on a small jar. However, I must say, most of these women are younger than forty. After Estée Lauder gave samples of Re-Creation to a group of distinguished Australian women, I spoke to one of them, who loved, loved, the product but was quite shocked when she found out the price. So, she started to make the kind of accounting we all do when we know we’re about to do something which might be considered indulgent. She reckoned she could make the jars last a few months, she could easily spend more on jeans in a year… her face was more important, wasn’t it?

In all honesty, my skin texture is amazing after a few months of using a variety of these products. But if you get frown lines from worrying about how you’re going to pay for them, then that rather destroys the purpose, doesn’t it?

Sydney of the Antarctic

2007-10-18T13:09:00.000+10:00

The incredible (and true) story of Sydney Walton Mouse's adventures in Antarctica is now available from ABC books. It's just darn gorgeous. My sister, Coral, wrote and illustrated it. Get it.

Retail Heiress

2007-09-01T10:34:00.001+10:00

When she was a girl, Pamela Myer Warrender might have been the model for Eloise, the mischievous little girl who had the run of New York’s Plaza Hotel in Kaye Thompson’s books. In Pamela’s case, however, she had an even more enticing doll’s house, the entire Myer Emporium in Melbourne, where her father, Norman Myer (later Sir Norman) was Chairman and Managing Director from 1938 until his death in 1956.

“I was passionate about the store,” she recalls on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography, Pamela: In Her Own Right (Hardie Grant, $29.95). “I’d follow my father around at night when it was being closed while he did his rounds checking on things. Quite often I used to sneak up to the kitchens where I got the best milkshakes and chicken sandwiches. My father used to say, ‘The people who work in this store are your friends. Smile.’ So I would smile at everybody. And of course that worked sometimes and it didn’t work other times!”

“Miss Myer,” as she was known then, worked during her school holidays in the store, as did her two younger brothers, Rodney and Beresford, and all their Myer cousins. Her first job was in the haberdashery department when she was thirteen. “On Fridays the store opened until 9 pm,” she writes “and my father told Mr Mathews [the manager] that I wasn’t to leave until I had the figures required for the day. To ensure this happened, I arranged a group of girls from school to bring their friends to buy handkerchiefs and hair clips. They couldn’t come all at once and they had to appear nonchalant – there was an art to the operation – but it always worked. As a reward we went off to Hillier’s Milk Bar in Collins Street for a chocolate marshmallow nut sundae.”

The spirited young Pamela would make this sense of enterprise a hallmark of her adult life, which has been both privileged and tumultuous and marked by great adventures, terrible betrayals and wrenching tragedy. Now 83, Pamela remains the tall, striking-looking, optimistic woman of her youth but her life is very much a simple one these days, the mansions, the country houses, the valuable works of art all gone. She lives in a chic but cramped Toorak apartment, the primary carer of ex-husband Simon Warrender, who is confined to a wheelchair and whom she remains devoted to even though they were divorced in 1985. Her autobiography, she says, is not “a Myer book” (she has already written a biography of her father) but a chance to set the record straight, to help her children know the trajectory of her life and understand “the bigger picture” of how her branch of the Myer family, Norman’s descendents, became estranged from the family business and its vast fortune.

Read more of my feature on Pamela Myer Warrender in the September issue of The Australian Women's Weekly.

Le Male

2007-09-01T10:22:00.001+10:00

The following is this month's Deeply Superficial column, published in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I wonder if the bottles of classic cologne that get wrapped and offered year after year for Father’s Day are the men’s equivalent of a woman getting a vacuum cleaner or a pair of nice socks for her birthday. Let’s face it, it’s difficult to be original here. Most men won’t venture beyond the bracing cleanness of something like Polo Black, dismissing anything more floral or pungent as girlie. For some of them, being given a bottle that has “pour homme” written on it is akin to asking them to shave their legs, an affront to their masculinity.

Like Carrie wearing men’s Jockey briefs to bed in Sex and the City, women are much more secure in their scent sexuality. Quite a few of us wear “men’s” fragrances regularly. (I have worn Geoffrey Beene’s bergamot-y Grey Flannel and a new men’s eau de toilette Kiton Black that smells quite like it.) But it can be agonising trying to get a man to move beyond Old Spice, let alone into something creative like Viktor & Rolf Antidote.

Now, I love Antidote and would happily wear it myself. It’s a men’s fragrance but it has sultry, spicy notes that smell really great on my skin when they dry down. And I think it is an antidote of sorts to the problem - why not give your man a men’s eau de toilette that works well on you? That way, if hates it or is shy about using it, you can steal it back.

Some ideas: Citrusy fragrances like L’Occitane’s Eau Fraiche Verveine Agrumes, a completely accessible light citrus verbena, L’Artisan Parfumeur’s Mandarine Tout Simplement, which smells like crushed mandarin skins or the Hermès Concentré D’Orange Verte, which is extremely uplifting and which I spray all over myself after the gym. In this vein, Aesop has released a deliciously pungent new unisex fragrance called Mystra, which draws its inspiration from Byzantium and blends exotic resins such as frankincense, mastic and labdanum.

At Jo Malone, try her innovative classic Lime, Basil & Mandarin, Wild Fig & Cassis or the almost-drinkable Blue Agava and Cacao, made from the flowers that are ingredients in the best Tequila. The Diptyque Philoskouros is the trend-setter among fig fragrances and, while it is thought of as a man’s cologne, it’s divine on women too. Malin + Goetz have synthesised natural ingredients into a collection of travel-sized bottles “for global nomads” containing fragrances that can be layered. Newest are Rum Tonic and Lotus Root.

Also at Mecca Cosmetica, the heavenly Serge Lutens collection, which includes many unisex possibilities, including Santal Blanc, a white sandalwood that my husband has already stolen from me, Gris Clair, a sweet lavender with an ashy dry down and Fumerie Turque, which has a top note of Turkish rose but base notes of leather and Balkan tobacco. And I think you can’t go wrong with Comme des Garcons 2 or 3, two eau de parfums that contain hearts of florals, wrapped in heady, spicy, exotic notes. (The beautiful silver bottle of CD2 is shaped like a whiskey flask – nothing girlie about that.)

Working on the principle that it’s a pity to waste a perfectly good fragrance on a man who can’t tell his Brut from his Burberry, why not give him Kai eau de parfum – a delicately feminine brew of white flowers that happens to be the favourite scent of Tommy Lee, who claims the fragrance calms him? (Goodness only knows what he’s like without it, if his twitchy performance on Rock Star Supernova is considered.) If you’re really bold you could give him Tom Ford Black Orchid, an OTT tropical fruit salad that’s totally scrumptious, but include two tickets to Bali in the package.

There’s another possibility – his’n’her sets, such as Prada Woman for you and the new Prada Man for him or Armani’s new masculine and feminine versions of Remix. Then, there’s Intimately Beckham for Men and Intimately Beckham for Women. Surely he can’t get upset that you think he’s as sexy as David Beckham. Of course, the downside is that he, in turn, might think you’re as sexy as Posh.

Explosive Choices

2007-07-29T09:12:00.000+10:00

The following is the text of this month's Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I travel outside Australia four or five times a year and a couple of years ago I bought myself a beauty case that would keep all my toiletries neat. It proved a masterstroke – the hard case was also big enough to hold a couple of books and a change of teeshirt and upon arrival at my hotel room, I could just open the case and access everything easily, without having to unpack it. Better still, it meant heavy and fragile bottles of moisturisers, sun creams and fragrance need not be packed in the checked-in suitcase, leaving more room (and weight) for those exotic artefacts, like Chinese parrots and sacks of frankincense, that I am always compelled to bring home.

Unfortunately, about a year ago, a group of wannabe terrorists were sitting around in a London apartment dreaming up crazy ways of taking down a jet airliner – including the almost impossible trick of mixing unstable fluids in an airplane toilet to make a bomb - and they were dobbed in. Predictable international hysteria followed. The upshot of all this, as we know, is the banning of fluids over 100 ml on international flights and the restriction of those permitted to a plastic ziplock sandwich bag, lest any of us intend the precarious task of locking ourselves in the loo and making explosives out of the mini products in our leather Molton Brown travel kits. (If those same products were squeezed into a plastic bag, we’d have carte blanche, of course.) Goodbye beauty case.

I’ve just returned from New York and LA, and the new restrictions meant I had to rethink my whole travel plan. I could not believe how small that sandwich bag was! For instance, Clarins’ E3p Screen Mist, which supposedly reduces the effect of electromagnetic waves, would seem to be the perfect product to spritz on yourself throughout the flight – however, the 100 ml bottle is also elegantly elongated and only fits into the bag if you choose to include little else. Thwarted. In the end, I called in travel-size products from all the brands and played around with them. Certainly, these small sizes are readily available – from Leaf & Rusher’s Mini Essentials pack, Aesop’s Jet Set Kit to Trilogy’s Travelers – and savvy travellers know to ask for samples of their favourite products whenever they’re making a purchase at the beauty counter. Some companies, such as Kiehl’s, make fantastically handy plastic bottles of most of their products in 30ml and 65 ml sizes. In my meagre plastic bag I managed to fit Tali Shine’s Evolution O2 face spray (30 ml), Jo Malone’s Rosemary & Lavender skin tonic (30 ml) Ginseng Day Moisture Cream (15ml) and Vintage Gardenia fragrance (9 ml), Colgate toothpaste (25 g) and a Bobbi Brown Lip Tint gloss (15ml).

But here’s the thing. While the plastic bag only has to contain what you might need for the flight on board, and you can check the rest, the sheer weight you could add to your suitcase if you brought your regular jars of skin care products, self-tanning lotions, hair gels, whatever, means possibly some expensive overweight charges on your return trip, unless you jettison those costly jars of Estée Lauder Re-Nutriv night and day creams before you fly back. Now, short trips mean that you can do the juggling trick and exist on small sizes of everything if you have to, but what happens if – and this is usually my situation – you’re off for three or four weeks? When I went to Romania in 2005 I brought the whole pharmacy with me. The choice is a heavy suitcase, restricting what you bring to one or two key items or buying everything when you get there and tossing it when you leave.

Yes, I know. It’s annoying but hardly Sophie’s Choice. Still, I’d feel less annoyed if someone proved to me it were necessary. When I went through security in New York no one seemed to care whether I had a plastic bag or not. And my lip gloss was a pretty explosive colour.

Is that a gun in her pocket?

2007-07-11T08:14:00.001+10:00

Can it be a coincidence that this month marks the 60th anniversary of both the house of Christian Dior and the Kalashnikov AK-47 rifle? I think not. But Dior scalliwag John Galliano sure missed a great opportunity to blow his audience away. Still, all reports suggest he did it anyway. Go here to check out the anniversary collection. Go here to buy your assault rifle.

The Lipstick Index

2007-06-28T07:43:00.000+10:00

In newsagents today - my Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

Peter Costello should really pay more attention to lipstick. Forget inflation, trade deficits, housing figures – the true indicator of where our economy is going is the humble lipstick.

Leonard Lauder, Chairman of the Estée Lauder group, first coined the phrase Leading Lipstick Indicator when he observed that during tough economic times the sale of lipsticks boom. Immediately after 9/11, for instance, the sales of lipsticks doubled, as women sought comfort from an indulgent but inexpensive source. When female consumers face a dismal financial outlook, it has been discovered, they seek something to make them feel better about themselves. And that thing often is lipstick.

Why lipstick? Well, it’s cheaper than an Easton Pearson skirt or a Chloe bag. It has the ability to quickly transform a face – especially a gorgeous, deep slash of red or a swoop of liquid gold. In this orally fixated society there’s something undoubtably sexy about a luscious pout (even for the pouter.) It’s maximum output for minimum outlay. But, more crucially I think, a cylinder of lipstick (more than a wand of gloss) is an icon of the mystic feminine, invested with the collective potency of a century of magazine advertisements and images of sultry Hollywood goddesses. Unfurl that tube and you unlock the vamp within.

In any case, economists now view lipstick sales as a surprisingly reliable indicator that consumer confidence is low. And that is troubling – given the number of new releases of lipsticks recently, clearly the cosmetic companies feel the global economy is about to dive. A considerable amount of effort has been put into developing lipsticks that not only provide new colours, formulas and textures but also new ways of presenting them in clever packaging which often incorporates a useful feature, such as a built-in mirror (YSL’s Lip Twins lip duo with satin and shine options) or even built-in LED lights for those many occasions when you need to apply lipstick in the dark (ModelCo’s Lip Lights Ultra Shine Gloss).

If you have any doubt about the attention cosmetic companies are paying to the little old lippie, check out Chanel’s advertisement for its lipstick Rouge Allure, which has been playing on TV screens and in the cinema for a couple of months. “Le Rouge,” inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 masterpiece Contempt (and borrowing the original music from Georges Delarue), is photographed by fashion great Bettina Rheims and features model Julie Ordon (a blander Brigitte Bardot) romping naked under white sheets with a tube of Rouge Allure (a lippie I love, by the way, because of it’s elegant click-open case.) “Tell me,” she purrs. “I want to know. Do you love my lips?” It’s all rather silly (if you’re going under the covers with something phallic, maybe a lipstick is a bit size-challenged) but girls and guys alike get the drift when our heroine slowly and lasciviously fills in her pout with creamy red: Lipstick equals sex equals big bucks.

Lancome is another company betting on the Lipstick Index. It had phenomenal success with Juicy Tubes and Juicy Gelée when the shiny look took off and now has released the next generation, Colour Fever Gloss, with the innovative Lip-Magnify applicator that is shaped so that it picks up more colour and contours more precisely. It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, but the brush does deposit the thick, rich gloss on your lips in a way that seems more sensually satisfying than glosses that have a hard tip or a brush. I’m the sort of person who notices these things: you may not. The colours themselves are lovely - rich with pigment and shot through with a beautiful moiré effect.

Of course, it helps to have a big pout to begin with. I’m mad about YSL’s Exfoliating Lip Balm, which gives your lips a stimulating, plumping scrub and tastes like spearmint milkshakes. (Ask him to lick it off.) I also like a bit of S&M for the lips - those products designed to sting your lips swollen, such as Do Wop’s Lip Venom and Stila’s Plumping Lip Glaze (both available at Mecca Cosmetica.)

Lead with your lips!

http://fabuloussomebody.blogspot.com

ANTWhinger

2007-06-07T18:20:00.000+10:00

It has taken me a couple of days to digest the momentous event which was the live telecast of the final of Australia's Next Top Model. I have, I admit, been following this avidly. (Missed a few episodes while in LA/NY and had to satisfy myself with watching America's Next Top Model in Australia instead.) But the final was a grubby experience, from the abysmal production values to the appalling manners of some of the hosts and contestants. When the host sets the tone by sulking, weeping and talking over the top of everyone else, then it sets an unfortunate standard for the teenage girls (contestants and viewers) who admire her.

Steph H, the runner-up, was devastated by her loss - and why not? Three of the judges spent a good part of the series drooling over her and building up her ego to the point where she truly thought she was another Kate Moss and had the prize in the bag. She quite possibly has a future as a Portmans model but the harsh realities of the fashion industry were clearly demonstrated by the fact that the four judges with real fashion cred voted for the eventual winner, Alice Burdeu. Somehow Steph, many of the other contestants and all the fans of the pretty sixteen year-old were encouraged to see Alice's height and slenderness as "unfair" and get upset about it, when, earth to Jodhi Meares, unfair is the status quo out there in the world. What's worse, I think Steph became a bit of a pawn in the ego contest between certain judges.

By the end of the show, the contestants seemed to have a misguided idea that personality was all that counted in the model biz. I particularly loved Alex Perry's astute comment when everyone was banging on negatively about Alice's reserved nature that confidence is not always expressed by being loud, bitchy and common. That's not something the show's producers want to hear. But I wonder, when all the face powder has drifted to the ground and the high-heeled shoes have been retired for another season, whether the young girls who were encouraged to be loud, bitchy and common on national television will have some serious regrets.

Next season - the witty and human Charlotte Dawson for host, please. (Although she apparently is to have her own show.) The viewers shouldn't vote. (It's not a popularity contest.) And let's not "punish" models who don't win challenges by making them do housework and other chores. The first time I heard the intelligent and sensitive Alice whinge about it I thought, now there's a top model!

1.14 million paper bags used every hour

2007-06-07T18:07:00.000+10:00

This is not a photo of my murky brain matter but a reduction of Seattle artist Chris Jordan's large-scale photograph of the 426,000 cell phones that are retired in the US each day. Go here to see more of the exhibition, Running the Numbers: an American Self-portrait, at New York's Von Lintel Gallery from June 14.

The Zorro in me

2007-06-04T08:15:00.000+10:00

The following is the text of this month's Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) and the (melbourne) magazines:

I’m not quite sure why, but I just love face masks. Maybe it’s the Zorro in me, but there’s something deeply satisfying – and deeply cleansing – about a cup of tea, a good lie down and a layer of mud on your face. I remember a particular favourite from my teenage years. I’m not sure what beauty company produced it – Coty? Revlon? – but it was a thick mud from a tube that came in three or four dazzling metallic shades. I had a molten silver one; my sister preferred metallic blue. I looked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and I still remember that when it dried it cracked unattractively – but, gosh, it was fun.

These days, face masks are so technologically superior that they can virtually make the cup of tea themselves. They can infuse your skin with your vitamins; they can balance, calm, revitalise, moisturise, hydrate, firm, lift, clarify, brighten, energise, exfoliate and write your master’s thesis for you. But they also loads more fun – more fun even than the silver robot mask of my teens. The fun quotient improved dramatically with the advent of cloth masks like SK-II’s Facial Treatment Mask and Whitening Source Intensive Mask, Clinique’s Moisture Surge Facial Sheet Mask, Skinvitals G-Energized and C-Brighten masks and ModelCo’s Face Lift Hydrating Face& Neck Mask. What I like most is unravelling the face-shaped cloth cutout and lying down for twenty minutes with it pressed to my skin like a mummy in a shroud. These kinds of masks are also great for scaring the cats. Or Halloween.

Recently, cloth masks have begun to appear in two-zone versions, with separate pieces to account for the different needs of for the eye area and the lower face. I’ve had two sessions with La Mer’s The Radiant Facial, which consists of a primer and a two-zone mask infused with white algae to counteract dullness and hyper pigmentation, and I’ve found the results excellent, particularly for mature skins. This is the ne plus ultra of cloth masks at $720 for a pack of eight treatments.

I’m having lots of fun with foam masks, too. A couple to try are Babor’s effervescent High Skin Refining Lifting Foam Mask, which goes on like shaving cream and then dissolves, or La Prairie’s Cellular Balancing Mask, a two-part treatment which is mixed in a bowl and applied with a brush. Then there are the exfoliating masks that give you a rather naughty tingle, such as Dr. Sebagh’s Deep Exfoliating Mask with azelaic acid, or Yves Saint Laurent’s Lisse Expert Esthetic Peeling Mask, which is a pink emulsion with exfoliating spheres which is left to sit on the skin for five minutes before being massaged in and washed off.

Aromatic masks that give your head some clarity as well as your skin include La Prairie’s juniper, orange and lemon Masque Cellulaire Energisante. If you’re into efficiency, take SK-II’s Skin Rebooster or Ultraceuticals Ultra C Treatment Cream into the shower and leave on while your face steams. And if you love good old deep-cleansing clay masks, try SkinCeuticals Clarifying Clay Masque or Aesop’s heavenly Parsley Seed Cleansing Masque.

But don’t do what I have done on more than one occasion – forget you have a mask on and answer the front door.

Appearances

2007-05-30T09:35:00.000+10:00

The Sydney Writer's Festival starts today...and I am dragging myself away from novel rewrites to make two appearances (three if you count the launch party tonight.) First off, I'm joining a panel called The Next Wave of Australian Crime Writers on Thursday May 31 at 5:30 p.m at the SDC 2/3 at the Sydney Theatre Company Wharf and on Sunday June 3 I'll be discussing The Empty Circus of Public Life at the Sydney Theatre from 4-5:30 p.m.

What I did on my vacation #4

2007-05-30T08:58:00.000+10:00

New York in spring... and a birthday bash for New Yorker cartoonist Victoria Roberts (pictured with pug Archie)...desserts to have a coronary over at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant in the new London hotel...almost slamming into Helen Gurley Brown upon my entrance into the new Hearst building, where I was invited to lunch...the heavenly Poiret exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, followed by my usual pilgrimage to the medieval armour collection...the dreadful tone-deaf LoveMusik on Broadway, redeemed by the transporting delights of Grey Gardens at the Walter Kerr...a few nights in my old stomping ground, the East Village, in Gatecrasher columnist Ben Widdicombe's guest room and then the quiet of Harlem where the WildKind boys have made their home...City Hall in full bloom... Bryant Park in the hot sun...my friend Thornton Willis in motion in his Soho loft, completing another glorious painting...discovering it's cheaper to ship books from Strand than lug them home in the case...the craziness of B&H photo...the disappointment of Century 21 at non-sale time...a train ride to Connecticut...devils on horseback at The Spotted Pig...the creeping nastiness of the all the furniture stores that have taken over my beloved Tribeca... too too much, all of it, and too little time.

What I did on my vacation#3

2007-05-30T08:09:00.000+10:00

Celebrated with the LA-based Aussie film industry at the 2007 Breakthrough Awards, held on May 3 at the Avalon Hotel in Beverley Hills...each year a golden boomerang is given to three Australians who have made significant breakthroughs in Hollywood in the past year. This year, the trio included teeny-weeny actresses Isla Fisher and Emilie de Ravin and the slightly more substantial director of Wolf Creek, Greg McLean. It's an event that might be called "intimate" - not too many of us could fit around the pool at the former nursing home. But that's its charm and what struck me was how damn sexy the crowd looked - especially the young Aussie actors, like Kick Gurry, who scrubbed up a treat in their slick LA suits. As an added bonus, heart throbs Chewitel Ejoifor and Michael Vartan could be found lurking among the cabanas. Talk about flying pheromones! One sour note was the conditions Isla Fisher's fiancee Sacha Baron Cohen put on his appearance at the event, although he seemed affable and relaxed on the night to me. Chatted to the Countess von Bismark-Schonhausen, actress Laura Harring, about her new film, Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera, and Persian director Ramin Niami (married to Australian powerhouse entertainment lawyer Karen Robson) about his forthcoming feature to be partly filmed in Iran. All in all, a bit of a shock to the system to find so many people in LA - and all in one place! - who were so engagingly intelligent and sartorially splendid.

What I did on my vacation #2

2007-05-24T10:12:00.001+10:00

Discovered Cafe Audrey...a block or two away from the Napoleon Perdis store, this charming cafe is the brainchild of another Aussie, Lola Nelson, a former Sydneysider who has been ensconsed in LA for fifteen years, working as a decorator. The derelict old drycleaners had been empty for 35 years and the neighbourhood was a big gang hangout until only a couple of years ago, but sensing the winds of change on the boulevard, Nelson and her business partner set up camp in the derelict store and revamped it as a shrine to the fashion icon after coming across a cache of old Audrey photographs in a drywall during the renovation. The cafe is a delightful riff on Hepburnism and the little black dress, with a black and white decor (houndstooth recovered cinema chairs; zebra-stripe painted floors, a wall of framed Audrey photographs, handwritten Audrey quotes on the walls.) Nelson combed thrift shops and junk yards for elements of the design. "Everything has a story; nothing came brand new," she says. Missing from this scenario is any obvious fan stuff - Nelson refuses to hang any posters of Breakfast at Tiffanys. However, in a tribute to Funny Face, poetry readings happen sporadically. Cafe Audrey, 6701-B Hollywood Boulevard, CA 90028. Phone (323) 465 5359.

What I did on my vacation #1

2007-05-24T09:22:00.000+10:00

May 1 2007... the opening of the Napoleon Perdis concept store on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles - the first makeup store there since the now defunct Max Factor emporium opened in the 1920s. You can't miss it - a double-fronted gold-painted vision of glamoroma on the formerly derelect boulevard. Inside, Napoleon's makeup academy, store, and private rooms for celebrity consultations. The decor? Leopard print, zebra stripes, crystal chandeliers, vintage lamps, baroque mirrors, studded satin sofas. (Think Gianni Versace and Roberto Cavalli in a menage-a-quatre with Rock Hudson and Doris Day.) I'm writing about Napoleon's empire for the July issue of The Australian Women's Weekly, so I'm going to save all the juicy tidbits for that. At left, the exuberant Napoleon on his red carpet. "They wanted to do a gold red carpet and I said, it's my first time in Hollywood - I want a red red carpet!"

Sweet Mother

2007-04-27T08:12:00.000+10:00

The following is the text of my column, Deeply Superficial, which ran this week in the (sydney) magazine and the (melbourne) magazine:

When I was a small girl, off to church in my lace gloves and hat, I remember Mothering Sunday, which was celebrated on the fourth Sunday after Lent, in honour of Mary, Mother of Christ. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as Ash Wednesday (when we could run about with faces stained with the black from burnt palm fronds) but it was a prettily festive occasion, the religious version of Mother’s Day – invented by the Americans, of course - which demanded greeting cards with kittens on them and cross-stitched tea towels, made in art class, as gifts.

Whenever the commercial Mother’s Day comes around on the second Sunday in May I rather like the idea of keeping it simple and old-fashioned. After all, the lavender and lace idea of motherhood has gone right out the window with Britney Spears, Vicki Pollard and those Yummy Mummies who wander around my local shopping mall with three-wheeled strollers in some kind of Pilates-induced trance. Bring back antimacassars, sponge cakes, knitting and housecoats, I say!

My eyes lit up when Debbie Wild, who is a Director of the British fragrance purveyor Jo Malone, responded to my question about what to do for Mother’s Day this year with a barrage of ideas that are perfectly gorgeous for mums of any inclination but especially those who love pretty, old-fashioned things. Jo Malone has patented the name Scent Surround™, but anyone can get the hang of the concept, which is not merely to scent yourself, but the room, your sheets, table linens, and so forth, so that your whole environment is one fabulous fug of heady fragrance. This requires different concentrations of scent, so there is Linen Spray for the napkins (heavenly on your clothing too, especially the Aqua di Limone which smells like freshly-laundered sheets), Living Cologne for the room, candles for the table and boudoir and, of course, personal cologne for the skin (French Lime Blossom is the number one seller for mums.) The trick is not to scent the whole place with one fragrance, but to combine different nuances so that your senses are constantly surprised.

These days, it’s very fashionable for events, such as weddings, parties and book launches, to be scented, so that the memory of the event can be brought back strongly through sense of smell. So why not scent Mother’s Day this year? Send mother out on a diversionary manoeuvre and pop into her home, spray the house, light candles, and bring in some complementary flowers, so that when she returns she’s uplifted by beautiful smells. Alternately, don’t just bring out the roast lamb, scent the Mother’s Day table with candles and Linen Sprays in something spicy or fruity, say Lime, Basil & Mandarin, Wild Fig & Cassis or Grapefruit (which is great in the kitchen to banish cooking smells.)

But my absolute favourite idea is to hold an old-fashioned afternoon tea, with platters of fairy cakes, macaroons, lamingtons and the like, and scent the table with a trio of travel candles in Parma Violets, Eau de Cologne and Sweet Almond Macaroon, with Parma Violets Tea Linen Spray on the napkins.

Combining all these fragrances may seem like a bit of a high-wire act for the uninitiated but help is at hand at Jo Malone counters where staff will happily take you through a “tasting menu” to develop your fragrance palette, “like wine,” as Debbie Wild says. In fact, a rather wonderful gift idea is to take Mum along for a session at one of these counters, so that she can select her own favourites and garner some very useful tips. (My favourite is to spray your front with one fragrance and your back with another, so that you leave a room smelling as intriguing as when you entered.)

What's up cupcake?

2007-04-24T08:50:00.000+10:00

Another day, another delivery of cupcakes. It seems every product launch comes with its own pink/blue/balloon-attached cupcake these days. We've even had dual cupcakes shaped like breasts sent by the flaks for a cosmetic surgeon. What's so mandatory about cupcakes? Are the PR gals trying to perpetuate the illusion that all is sweet with the world? Frankly, the sugar rush at 4 in the afternoon is not welcome. And it's not effective - the minute our brains register "cupcake" we're not in the slightest interested in what product is being promoted. So, gals, enough already - the sordid little truth of all this is that we cannot resist a good cupcake and these regular afternoon deliveries are threatening the very existence of the Size O Beauty Editor, of which there are many in this universe. And we can't have that. Not at all.

Good Press

2007-04-17T08:27:00.000+10:00

Vogue Australia Features Editor Clare Press launched her first fashion collection, Mrs. Press, yesterday, in sweet celebratory style with home-made passionfruit Melting Moments and cups of tea, while her pretty, refigured vintage dresses wafted in the breezes of posh Sydney suburb Darling Point, with the "coathanger" of Sydney Harbour Bridge appropriately poised in the background. The newly-wed Mrs. Press has been collecting vintage clothing for years but, like most of us who stumble on a beautiful fabric or style in the flea market or thrift store, has often been disappointed with the fit or cut of what she's found. She bought it all anyway. Now she has rescued the best of it and modernised the fit and style while retaining most of the yesteryear charm. I swear I have owned all these dresses at different points in my life - the blue velvet coat, the black lace tea-gown, the organza party dress. In fact, in a trunk, I still have the twin sister of "Juicy Pintuck" (modelled by the lovely Mrs. Press, at left) a confection of sunset-coloured organza. Will she ever be worn again? Sadly, not until I get refigured as well. The clothes are available at Marnie Skillings, 123 Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, Sydney. Phone 61 2 9699929.

The Keating Rap

2007-04-13T06:40:00.001+10:00

Never thought I'd be in a position to say thankyou to Red Symons...but bless him for this. Warning: only Aussies will understand it.

PIn Up of The Month

2007-04-13T06:33:00.000+10:00

You know how I adore him... the meticulously uncloseted Mr Tim Gunn of Project Runway. And now, for your enjoyment, this from the New York Times Style pages.

Syrian Chicken

2007-04-05T17:51:00.000+10:00

In honour of Nancy Pelosi's visit to Syria, we're having Syrian Chicken for dinner tonight. Here's the recipe, courtesy of Karen Martini and Sunday Life:

PLACE 2 tsp sea salt, 2 tsp ground cinnamon, 2 tsp ground cumin, 1 tsp freshly cracked black pepper, 1 tsp ground tumeric in a plastic bag. CHOP a large chicken into eight pieces and toss into the bag, coating well with the spices. HEAT 100 ml of oil in a heavy saucepan and fry the chicken until brown. Set aside. ADD the following to the hot oil and fry for 3 minutes: 2 brown onions, thickly chopped, 100g fresh ginger, peeled and cut into matchsticks, 5 cloves garlic, bruised with the back of a knife, 2 small red chillies, split. ADD 2 small chopped tomatoes, 2 pinches of saffron threads, 1/2 tsp cumin seeds, 5 sprigs of thyme and let cook another 2 minutes. RETURN the chicken to the pan and add the juice and zest of one lemon, 2 Tabs honey, 100g of currants, 2 Tabs vegetable stock powder and enough water to barely cover the chicken. COVER with a lid and simmer for 10 minutes. UNCOVER and simmer for 10-15 minutes until cooked through and the sauce is slightly reduced. STIR in 1/2 bunch coriander leaves. SERVE with rice or couscous.

Un-boring Goring

2007-04-04T07:30:00.000+10:00

His hotel might be ultra-posh and situated virtually in the back yard of Buckingham Palace, but Jeremy Goring, a Richard Gere lookalike whose family has owned London's The Goring hotel for 95 years, is a breath of very unstuffy air. At a lunch for him at Sydney's Quay restaurant yesterday, the resplendent-in-pink Mr. Goring kept a table of jaded travel writers in stitches with his tales of high life and low life in the hotel trade. Highest of all is his story about having to alert the security guards at Buckingham Palace each time a repairman needs to get on the roof of the hotel - the job needs to be done in five minutes, or the guards open fire. Low life? Well that would be the time Russell "Mate" Crowe attended a wake at the hotel and staggered into the bathrooms with a mob of lesser mates. George Goring, Jeremy's feisty father, was also in the bathroom and needed to wipe his hands. The aforementioned mates, high on their own testosterone, allegedly wouldn't let the older man near the towels. So the marvelous George simply fronted Russ, pulled out the ends of Russ's clean white dress shirt and wiped his hands on it. Impressed when he found out George was the owner of the hotel, Crowe started babbling about how he was going to make The Goring his London home-away-from-home. George listened to this calmly and apparently said, in the most elegant Queen's English, "Why don't you just fuck off?" And Russ has never been seen there since. Effective, no? The Goring has won my vote as the place to stay in London.

The Mist of Propaganda

2007-03-31T09:05:00.000+10:00

April Fool's Day has come one day earlier this year, with this morning's news of David Hicks' sentencing and the extremely transparent condition that he may not speak to the press for the first year of his sentence - which brings us past the next federal election, of course. And also giving Ruddock, Downer et al a serious hard-on, the absurd new carry-on rules for international flights, wherein potentially explosive lip-glosses and deodorants are required to be sealed in plastic ziplock sandwich bags. Sadly, that size bag does not fit my new bottle of Clarins Expertise e3p Screen Mist, which is supposed to protect the skin from electromagnetic waves as well as urban pollution. How perfect it would have been on a flight!

The George Effect

2007-03-29T08:09:00.000+10:00

The following is the text of my column, Deeply Superficial, in the (sydney) magazine this week:

I don’t know where the idea of the male hairdresser as sex god came about but certainly Warren Beatty gave the notion currency in his sensational performance as the promiscuous George in Hal Ashby’s 1975 movie Shampoo. Thanks to Beatty, since then just about every straight hair stylist on the planet seems to have modelled himself after George who, in turn, (a little bit of trivia here) was himself modelled on sixties hairdresser-to-the-stars Jay Sebring, more famous now for being murdered with his old girlfriend Sharon Tate when the Manson Family came calling in 1969. I’m sure straight male hairdressers don’t expect Sebring’s fate but they do rather fancy his life – an endless stream of beautiful, available women, fast-cars, rock-star celebrity and a working wardrobe of tight leather pants. If you think I’m wrong about this, consider how many male hairdressers you run across who look like Kevin Rudd.

Clearly, there is something sexual about having a woman trembling and vulnerable in your hands and the women rather like it too, especially if you dress like Jim Morrison. The “service” provided sometimes is less about getting rid of split ends and more about buying an attractive man’s total attention for an hour or so. George actually offered his special clients a shag with their shag cut – they may not go that far in South Yarra or Surry Hills, but a little bit of flirtation with your foils make the hefty cost of the experience so much more palatable.

But I am digressing because I want to talk about Frédéric Fekkai, internationally famous hairstylist, and the man most often these days given the George comparison. (Although Jonathan Antin, of Arena’s reality series Blow Out, must be a close second.) Fekkai was in Australia recently to promote his expansive range of hair care products, which are available nationally at Mecca Cosmetica and to launch his Ageless three-step regimen for aging and thinning hair. A native Frenchman of Moroccan background, he came into hairdressing by a circuitous route – he accepted a small acting role on a film to help him pay his way through law school and on the set became fascinated with the work of the hair stylists. He tossed his degree and moved from Provence to Paris to learn his craft. In the late eighties he went to New York, where he launched a salon in Bergdorf Goodman and, in 1996, his own salon and spa on 57th Street. Now he has salons and spas in Beverly Hills and Palm Beach and counts among his clients Scarlett Johansson, Heidi Klum, Debra Messing, Salma Hayek and Penelope Cruz.

It’s not a bad career move for a hairdresser to be handsome, charming and blessed with an exotic accent. But Fekkai’s real skill seems to be in making his clients feel that they absolutely the centre of his attention. He has his client stand up while he cuts her hair, so that he can see her silhouette, her body language – the total woman. He is also liberal with his advice on how his client should dress and how she should do her makeup. (I bet those New York dames are putty in his hands.) In person, he’s different to what I expected – intelligent, elegant, relaxed, and very un-George, with no sign of George’s leather pants or chestwig-baring shirts. And he diverges from George in the matter of commitment – last year he got married for the second time, to YSL PR rep Shirin von Wulffen.

His message about beauty is what we want to hear. “Its important that today a very sophisticated woman is not just trendy. What matters is what looks sensational on you.” If there is a trend today, he says, it’s to customise. Hair length and colour are ageless, as long as it suits you. The best news? In his New York salon, he still leaves a few slots in his schedule open for new, non-celebrity clients. “The most exciting thing is when you see someone for the first time. You give them the best you can,” he says. So go for it, girls…

Kangaroo Court

2007-03-28T09:37:00.000+10:00

From civil rights lawyer H. Candace Gorman today on the Huffington Post, a very clear summary of what happened in David Hicks' commital hearing at Gitmo yesterday.

Fat Chance

2007-03-28T07:30:00.000+10:00

I'm not sure whether it is supposed to be some kind of social experiment, but you don't need a scientist to tell you that when you get a group of hungry, stressed, insecure and lonely teenage girls in a room and have cameras on them 18 hours in the day, some of them are going to break down in tears. Some of them are going to act like prima donnas. One or two are going to hate each other on sight. And at least one will give a spectacularly good attention-grabbing performace of an anxiety attack.

I felt a bit squeamish last night watching the first episode of the the third series of Australia's Next Top Model because of the intense voyeurism associated with the brand. Last night, in the first episode, the camera fixed for far too long on poor Jaime's teary arguments with her boyfriend, which led to her bailing out of the program after barely a week of competition. Yes, yes, we know modelling is a tough profession, but these intrusive expeditions into teenage girls' personal lives are nothing to do with modelling and all about great grabs for the program's promos. In signing up for "an opportunity of a lifetime", young girls who are extremely unsophisticated in the ways of the media (as often are their families) have signed away their rights to any dignity and privacy. It's mandatory for participants in reality TV programs to do this, but I think a little more caution should be taken with tender young girls who, after all, are competing for a professional prize, not just to prove they are Australia's Next Best Exhibitionist, as with Big Brother. How humiliated do they feel when they watch themselves afterwards? Is this an embarrassment they carry with them for life?

And another thing - while I totally applaud the fact that the judges (a decent bunch of fashion professionals) are delicate about the issue of weight and size, gently telling only one or two girls that they should, in Alex Perry's words, drop "a couple of Ks", the reality is that only ethereal, waif-like Alice of the sharp hipbones is likely to have a big career on the international modelling circuit. This is a serious problem, endemic in the fashion business, that everyone is tippy-toeing around. It would hardly be responsible television to tell any of these girls that they are too fat, and I think it's wise to point out concerns with Alice's health, but the minute the girls go on a real life go-see, the heavier ones will be told in no uncertain terms, by people who are less kind, they need to drop a lot of weight. This is a serious conundrum for concerned people in the fashion business - do we change the culture from the inside-out by convincing designers to make their sample sizes larger and modifying fashion editors' tastes for the skeletal and macabre (fat chance, I'd say) or do we change it from the outside-in by altering young women's perceptions of what is beautiful and fashionable? Remember, it was only fifteen years ago that the Supermodels reigned - and they were a far more bodacious bunch than the current crop of X-rays. It will be fascinating to see how this year's judges handle the issue.

Secret Kingdom

2007-03-11T07:44:00.000+11:00

“Where?” is almost everyone’s response when I say I have just returned from Oman. The ignorance is not surprising – Oman has been until recently one of the world’s most secluded nations, cut off from its adjoining neighbours, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, by a belt of barren mountains and treacherous desert, and lost to the modern world for most of the twentieth century because of political instability and lack of economic development. It is the most traditional of the Arabic nations, one of only two countries in the world still ruled by a Sultan (Brunei is the other), where the men are required to wear ankle-length robes called dish-dashas and the women for the most part wear black gowns and veils, some of them heavily jewelled. There are no high-rise buildings in the country (banned by the Sultan’s decree) and no shopping malls containing designer boutiques. It is only a 45-minute flight from Dubai, the new Mecca of modern consumerism, and yet, as soon as you venture outside the airport in Muscat, the capital, you feel you have stepped smack-bang into a page from The Arabian Nights."

...That was the first paragraph of my story on the Sultanate of Oman and the splendid Al Husn hotel in the Shangri La's Barr Al Jissah resort complex which appears in the April issue of Vogue Australia. On sale now.

The Portrait of Dorian Lauder

2007-03-08T07:27:00.000+11:00

Naughty me, deadline week for my novel and I snuck off to a extravagant lunch to introduce Estee Lauder's Re-Nutriv Re-Creation day and night creme duo to a group of twenty women targeted by the brand as potential ambassadors for the product. Increasingly, savvy corporations are enlisting the goodwill of high-profile women to spread the message about luxury products by word-of-mouth. Let's face it (and this is about faces) it's flattering to identitified as such, Krug'd and dined splendidly, and then handed the coveted goodie bag at the end of the lunch - in this case two jars of the creme, which is valued, I believe, at around $AUD1300. No strings attached, of course - you're free to love it or leave it - but the brands are generally confident that there will be a lot of loving going on. Do I love Re-Creation? Well, I ditched the $400 jar of something else to try it and I have to say I'm very well-disposed towards it after only two nights and a day. It's lighter than most Lauder moisturisers and incredibly dewy. It's not going to help me finish my novel but when I get round to doing the publicity hopefully I can get away with being a "bright young novelist."

2007-03-03T07:51:00.000+11:00

Happy Mardis Gras to all of gay Sydney - may your cowboys all be rhinestone tonight.

Pinup of the Month

2007-02-27T20:15:00.000+11:00

Handsome chappy, isn't he? I'm researching the Romanian chapters of my novel now and dug up this photo of Daniel Petru Corogeanu, the Romanian priest accused of killing a villager in an exorcism. Starved and chained his victim to a crucifix, apparently with the help of four nuns.

Indiscreet Pleasures

2007-02-27T07:48:00.000+11:00

What a gay time was had by all at Sydney's Seymour centre last night when Bob Downe and Mitzi Macintosh hosted Rupert Everett for a conversation about his scintillating autobiography Red Carpets and other banana skins.

Subjects ranged from the size of Bob Geldorf's cock to Sharon Stone's sexual technique to the new trend among Hollywood female stars to have their genitals injected with collagen to make them look prettily engorged. (Why are we not surprised?) The audience of mostly middle-aged gay men seemed very keen to know if Rupe was a "top" or a "bottom," which he deflected cleverly. There was much camping around on the Ikea set by Bob and Mitzi, fueled by vodka toasts in Swedish style, and the bemused Mr. Everett was an all-round good sport.

Rupert will be marshall of the parade at the gay and lesbian Mardi-Gras next Saturday night. In the meantime, read his book, which is hilarious, bitchy, self-deprecating and unputdownable. Beyond this, he writes like an angel, with breathtaking passages of literary brilliance, especially in his insightful observations of the downside of fame and his relationships with complicated women such as Paula Yates and Beatrice Dalle. As Bob said last night, as a showbiz autobiography "it's right up there with David Niven's The Moon is a Balloon and the Dirk Bogarde books." But methinks it's even better than that.

Dregulator Videocast #1

2007-02-23T08:28:00.001+11:00

In honour of Dick Cheney's visit to Australia this week, please enjoy this commentators, Cintra Wilson.

The Decolletage has Bolted

2007-02-22T11:32:00.000+11:00

The following is an abridged version of my column, Deeply Superficial, which appeared in the (sydney) magazine today:

I have just finished reading Nora Ephron’s ever-so-light little book, I Feel Bad About My Neck And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman (Black Swan.) The American director and screenwriter (When Harry Met Sally) finds herself at that age when she has to wear sweaters that rise almost to her chin because of the crêpey – and creepy - state of her neck.

“According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 43, and that’s that,” she writes. “Short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck… the neck is a dead giveaway. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.”

Like Ephron, I wish someone had told me about necks earlier, although I do have a vague recollection of a female teacher advising we schoolgirls to stop pulling at our throats while we were studying. But who listens to anyone at 16? Least of all a fiftyish schoolmarm who, in retrospect, was having her own neck crisis?

Now that I am the age of Kim Basinger, Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice, I see the folly in neck neglect. I’ve always been careful about my face, in a modest way - always wearing sunscreen, not drinking too much, not smoking and never wearing makeup to bed. But all this care and attention stopped at the jaw, as if my face were a delicate hothouse flower and the neck just the bit of old wire that held it up. I had a lot of neck disrespect, I can see that now. And I’m certainly not alone in this.

The sun, of course, is the enemy here. We love to wear low-cut dresses and tank tops in summer and we have an unshakeable belief that a tanned bosom is superior to a white one. (That thudding sound you hear is Casanova and Lord Byron turning over in their graves.) Beyond this, there is another culprit – the drying alcohol in the perfume we spray on our necks and between our breasts. From the chin down to the bosom there is a swathe of unchartered and unloved territory that becomes a war zone by the time we are fifty. Some women say goodbye to plunging bras forever. Others discover chokers. Now I understand why women love jewellery – there’s nothing like a few strands of pearls for hiding a chest that looks like an unironed bed sheet with wet tea-leaves sprinkled all over it.

What to do? There are quite a few neck creams around but I haven’t worked my way through them yet. A few months ago I hit on the genius idea of using the anti-stretch mark cream, StriVectin-SD, on my neck and décolletage, thinking it might reduce the depth of the lines. No luck so far. I’ve had more success with simply doing to my neck and décolletage what I do to my face. (Although, actually, that’s not that simple these days.) Right now, I’m trying La Mer The Lifting Intensive (it comes in a tiny bottle with the serum) teamed with Dr. Brandt’s The Specialist V-Zone Neck Cream and it seems to be making a difference to the fine skin on my neck but, let’s face it, this is an extravagance if you’re on a budget and it does little for my chest, where the skin is tougher and the lines deeper.

ModelCo has just released Erase Those Fine Lines, a clever little wand that temporarily firms and tightens the skin around the eyes (great under makeup before a night out) but I find myself wishing they’d also release Erase Those Deep Crevices for my chest. Basically, the horse has bolted.

Girls – button up your blouses this summer!

Is it all Krapp?

2007-02-19T07:47:00.000+11:00

Ralph, darling...if you're going to have toilet sex with a flying kangaroo, for God's sake choose one who doesn't find your conversation about Samuel Beckett "boring chit chat." Some of us have honours degrees in English Literature.

The Divine David

2007-02-19T07:44:00.001+11:00

And here's a little sample of his work...

The Divine David

2007-02-18T17:53:00.001+11:00

Divine indeed...Sydneysiders should run to The Royal Sydney Soap Opera House for this week's performances by brilliant anarchist comedian David Hoyle, who takes comedy into the unchartered territory of child abuse and political assassination. Gives a new meaning to the expression "killing them in the aisles."

2007-02-10T06:56:00.000+11:00

Anna Nicole Smith died like Marilyn? She wished. If Anna Nicole was a midday soap with tits then Marilyn was a Shakesperian play. In time we will find out that Anna Nicole was having a clandestine affair with Dick Cheney and Howard Stern had been hired by the neo-cons to bump her off.

Vertigo

2007-02-07T16:36:00.000+11:00

It took me long enough to discover it...but the best cocktail and view combo in Sydney is from the 36th floor of the Shangri-La Hotel at the swank Blu Horizon Bar. The glass walls are vertiginous but if you can get over the woozy feeling, the cocktail list will make you even woozier. Say nothing of how you'll feel if you seriously work your way through it. I love a great cocktail list and this is one of the best. Such decadence doesn't come cheaply - but a tipple here is an event.

League of Gentlemen

2007-01-30T18:01:00.000+11:00

The Metrosexual has been test-driving a new range of men's grooming products (men are "groomed;" we women are beautified) from The Refinery, an exclusive spa for gentlemen in Mayfair, London. While we might be tempted to scoff at the pomposity of a private club wherein modern-day Beau Brummells are primped and pampered, The Metrosexual, usually difficult to please, is in fact quite taken with the products. The Shave Cream "blasts out of the pump," he enthuses."You don't need much to make it thick but not heavy. It smells of clove and Armagnac." The Post Shave Balm is "cool to the skin, like a luxe butter. Try some on your lamb chops." The Face Scrub: "The minty memory of barbershops as a boy." And The Moisturiser? "Unreal formaldehyde lab smell with olive oil." Unreal in the surfing sense or in the not-lifelike sense? Available now at Mecca Cosmetica.

Not the only gay

2007-01-30T16:23:00.000+11:00

Now, isn't this a pack of rogues? Look closely - Kath & Kim meets Little Britain meets Bob Downe. My pal Mark Trevorrow sent this photo along after his first Bob show at Melbourne's Butterfly Club on January 21. Left to right: Jane Turner, Magda Szubanski, Kevin McGee, Matt Lucas, Mark Trevorrow, Gina Riley, Fiona and John Thorn. (Photo courtesy the musical Thorns.) God, if only you could bottle it.

No Vangelis?

2007-01-25T10:01:00.000+11:00

I've been a naughty little non-poster in the past few weeks but I know readers of my books will forgive me as I'm confronting an horrendous deadline for my next novel. Forty-two chapters and counting down...Once I'm done, I'm off to LA and New York for a bit of R&R... In the meantime, I have been listening to Kaiser Karl's double-CD compilation of music he really really likes. Why am I surprised that I actually really really like a lot of this material too? It's divided into "home" and "work/fashion show" selections, with Karl's short attention span scattershotting everything from disco to gypsy music. I am reminded of the first fashion show music I ever heard, in Paris at YSL back in the early eighties - Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express. Thank you Andrew Olds for bringing me the album from Madrid - down here we have to wait until March if we want to buy it in store.

Brideshead Regurgitated

2007-01-20T13:08:00.001+11:00

The Ovation Channel has been screening the digitally-remastered version of the TV "classic" Brideshead Revisited. I've been nestling down with the teddy bear and a few gallons of very fine red to watch it each Wednesday evening - but, my Gawd! How dreary is it? What might have seemed elegeaic in 1981 now just appears comically pompous. We know what happened to Jeremy Irons, but where on earth is Anthony Andrews? Gone to Luvvy Land apparently. I've found this selection of outtakes on YouTube - worth it for scenes of Jeremy chucking a custard pie and Anthony merely chucking.

It's not Picasso

2007-01-18T08:06:00.000+11:00

It's a new year in beauty and those crazy fashion PRs are up to their tricks again. To promote a new range of Joico hair care for blondes, we are sent... a painting. Oh, well, rather than ruining the environment with a gift shop's worth of boxes, ribbon, cellophane and styrofoam, as is usually the case for these promo gimmicks, the girls at Hush at least have given a bohemian a job.

Me and My Music

2007-01-15T16:43:00.000+11:00

I'm spinning some of my favourite disks on ABC local radio tonight (702 Sydney, 936 Hobart) from 9 pm with my pal Mark Trevorrow. My summer music mood includes Yma Sumac (left), CocoRosie with Antony, Brigitte and Serge, Leonard Cohen, Marianne Faithfull, Melanie, Rufus Wainwright and Canadian-Mexican singer Lhasa de Sela. Serge est mort but I'm pleased to see that Yma is still warbling. And that old chestnut about her really being Amy Camus from Brooklyn - not true.

Star cross'd

2007-01-12T08:44:00.000+11:00

Happy birthday to me and my fellow January 12thians Kirstie Alley, Rob Zombie and Howard Stern. What a strange mob we make.

Style tip: orange goes with everything

2007-01-09T10:10:00.000+11:00

My Bring David Hicks Home mini-billboards have arrived this morning, thanks to GetUp! Stylishly Guantanamo Orange in colour - and water-proof! Now the dilemma is - where to put them? I live in a quiet little street where only the postman comes by. I worry they're not going to be effective here. And - I hate to admit this - there's something of the bumper sticker about them, of the Che Guevara poster in the student dormitory or the Aboriginal flag dangling from the art dealer's Paddington terrace. But - still - I must get over this post-Hippie malaise that has gripped us all. The cult of cool, which sidelined activism during the 80s and 90s, needs to be tossed, otherwise we'll be strangled by our collective ennui. Hearts back on the sleeves everyone! On January 11 Camp Delta will be five years old. Join the protest, get up, order your own free Bring David Hicks Home placard.

The Tempest on the Tennis Court

2007-01-06T08:50:00.000+11:00

Reasons to watch the AAMI Kooyong Classic, starting next Wednesday, and the Australian Open, which begins on January 15? How about this one?

The China Syndrome

2007-01-05T08:03:00.000+11:00

I don't make New Year's resolutions - but this year I thought, what the hell. I will not buy any clothing made in China. I will not spend my posperous Western bucks on anything that will steal the girlhood away from millions of young Chinese women. (See post "China Blue" 6/12).) I have so far held the line (five days and counting) but my resolution is proving trickier than I thought. I have deliberately NOT gone shopping, even though there are 50% reductions all over town. I do not need any more clothing. Nevertheless, my husband gave a gift certificate to Fleur Wood, which necessiatated a visit to Paddington Shopping Village. Luckily, Fleur's heavenly satin bias-cut slips are made in Australia, so I snaffled a brilliant midnight-teal one without breaking into a sweat. (It's very Maggie the Cat.) Then my inbuilt radar took me around the corner to Elizabeth Street, where Easton Pearson was having a sale. Again, all made in Australia - so, even though I was not buying anything, I bought a pretty black Victorian blouse that I'll treasure for years. But the Puma yoga pants at Rebel Sport had to be put back on the rack and the entire collection at Country Road was made in China. (Shame on you.) My husband says I am going to end up naked by the end of the year. But he forgets that I am still wearing clothes that are 25 years old. We called it "investment dressing" when I worked at Vogue back in the 70s and 80s. And it paid off. Photo courtesy of vogue.com.au

Not the wire coathanger!

2007-01-01T14:53:00.000+11:00

Welcome 2007 - the International Year of the Drycleaner. At least it would have seemed so by the giant red neon coathanger that appeared last night on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Or was it something to do with the fact that the bridge, affectionately known by all as the "coathanger," is 75 this year? One thing for sure - Joan Crawford would not be pleased. Maybe the spitting from the heavens that we all took for rain was actually Joan expressing her distaste.

Princess Superstar

2006-12-30T09:10:00.000+11:00

So Paris Hilton is in Sydney to promote a new beer. I can't help thinking how Andy Warhol would have loved her. With her vacuous, half-amused stare and her teeny little voice she's the ultimate Warhol Superstar. In fact, Paris could be Warhol reincarnated with real hair, her umm and whatever substituting for his wow. So, give the girl a break. She's not Armageddon in a Vuitton bikini but a work of art. Paris' shopping spree, left, courtesy of the smh.

Cardonnay with the turkey anyone?

2006-12-24T17:29:00.000+11:00

I'm having a noice Chrissie in Kath & Kim land, right in the heart of the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. Luckily, it's cold enough for ugg boots and Cooggi sweaters so that's got the dress code sorted. Feeling a bit wobbly after getting stuck into the Bundy that was supposed to go into Nigella's Iced Rum Cream. But, really, that's enough of me pretending to be Australian. These are not my people.

Listened to The Essential Leonard Cohen all the way down the Hume Highway. Let me share with you my current favourite lyric, from Len's The Future: When they said repent, I wondered what they meant. Might be my slogan for 2007. But I am, as usual, getting ahead of myself.

First, the recipe for Iced Rum Cream, which can be whipped up tonight to go on tomorrow's pudding: Take 300 ml of double cream and whip it until thick. In a separate bowl whip two egg yolks until frothy. Into this beat 2 tablespoons of Golden Syrup and 2 tablespoons of dark rum. Fold the egg mixture into the cream. Freeze overnight. One hour before serving the pudding, take the rum cream out of the freezer and let slightly defrost in the fridge. Throw over pudding with gay abandon. (That's for you, Mark Trevorrow.)

Surf's Up

2006-12-22T12:13:00.000+11:00

I live on one of Sydney's most beautiful beaches and look at the ocean from just about every window in my house. I'm married to a surfer. I even once wrote a novel, Two Shanes, about an Australian surfer in New York. But do you think I like waves? Nup. I'm scared of 'em. So it is quite a turn up for the books, as they say, that I was almost tempted to don a little red and yellow cap and join the corps of the Australian voluntary lifesavers last month after interviewing a swag - parade? - of female lifesavers for The Australian Women's Weekly. (2007 marks the centenary of volunteer lifesaving in Australia.) I'm usually a grouch at the beach - hate the sun, the sand in your bathers, the water which is always too cold, down here at least - but this bevy of beach babes made marching up and down the beach with flags, rowing big surf boats and zooming around on jet skis sound kinda fun. Oh well, in another life. A devoted sybarite, I usually don't do anything that involves rotating your shoulder cuffs. "If you go down to the beach today you’re sure of a big surprise. That lantern-jawed, fair-haired, bronzed lifesaver you remember from your childhood is almost as likely these days to be a woman." That's how the article begins. You can read the rest in the January issue of AWW.

What would Jesus do?

2006-12-21T07:54:00.000+11:00

...throw all the money-lenders (shoppers) out of the temple (shopping malls) for a start. I am repulsed by retail pornography this Christmas: the tizzy, jingle-jangle smugness of it all. Yeah, we're prosperous, but come Boxing Day, we'll feel about as good as the crumpled pieces of wrapping paper we discarded. What we need usually can't be put in a box with a bow on it. Better, I think, to avoid the whole lot of it and donate to a charity like Medecins Sans Frontiers in the name of family and friends or, if they really insist on having something to unwrap under the Christmas tree, at least give ideas in the form of books or subscriptions to independent magazines like The Monthly. And, if you really must give something in a box, then have a look at Aussie brand Aesop's witty gift packs, such as The Republic of Hedonism, which includes six luscious skin-care products, a facial treatment gift voucher and a copy of Summer in Algiers by Albert Camus.

You know who you are

2006-12-20T11:56:00.000+11:00

Milan bans super-skinny fashion models in line with Spain and Brazil... will someone please ban those angry skeletons who pose as fashion editors and stylists now? We know whose fault it is.

Pin Up of the Month

2006-12-19T07:54:00.000+11:00

I offer this handsome gentleman as my pin-up of the month. He is Sultan Qaboos Bin Said Al Said of Oman, ruler of Ibadhi Muslim Oman since 1970, when he deposed his father, a rather charmless despot. The good king Qaboos seems to be much-loved by his subjects, although there is some nervousness about who might ascend to the throne when he dies. You see, the Sultan is a confirmed bachelor and, although he married briefly in the 1970s, appears to have no offspring. Rumours abound that he has a son hidden in England, as he was hidden by his father for much of his youth. It's a family tradition, it seems. Oman certainly doesn't suffer from having an "artistic" ruler - the country is art directed to death, with the men obliged to wear long white robes and the women jewelled black burqas. In the capital Muscat, all the buildings must be painted white and can't rise above six stories. Pure Arabian Nights. My story on Oman and the gorgeous new Shangri-La Hotel will appear in Vogue Australia some time in early 2007.

Bigotry du jour

2006-12-15T08:08:00.000+11:00

Australians aren't racist? In this morning's news, the town of Tamworth, NSW denies five Sudanese refugee families residency on the grounds that they might induce a "Cronulla-riot-style situation" and another grave injustice is visited on our aboriginal people. In this Australia bigots have the confidence to speak out and the power to act.

Curdled Creme Brule

2006-12-14T08:35:00.000+11:00

Yes, I've been silent for a week...jetlag after the Oman trip and the Christmas rush of magazine deadlines before everyone closes down. Well, that's the official excuse. Anyway, I'm putting my head up today to make an observation that struck me last night, while watching Counter Culture, the six-part TV series about global shopping habits, presented by Tyler Brule (or Creme Brule as my husband calls him.) Actually, the series is more about Tyler's profile and Tyler's clever way with knotting scarves than anything deep and meaningful about consumer habits. But listening to his precisely clipped vowels and noting the perfect fit of his pressed jeans, I thought - would someone please mate this guy with Project Runway's Tim Gunn? What a beautiful, sonorous, couple they'd make.

Is this the original size 00?

2006-12-07T09:22:00.000+11:00

Here's to the $1 million dress! Let's hope it has gone to a good home and not doomed to a miserable life on Victoria Beckham's bony back. Made me wonder if there were any other cinematic frocks out there worth a Dr.Evil ransom. Suggestions please... Oh, on another note altogether (but somehow weirdly related, although I can't quite work out why) the new series of Australian Princess has begun. Twelve scrubbers in search of a prince. We may laugh, but if it can work for Mary Donaldson it can work for a pig farmer from Victoria. When asked who her favourite princess was, one contestant offered the following: "I like Princess Mary best because she went from a size 14 to a size 8." Aspirational!

China Blue

2006-12-06T14:08:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I bought a smart pair of Sportscraft trousers. As with almost anything you buy these days - from Armani to Target - the trousers were made in China. I was in Beijing a year ago and it's impossible not to be struck by the cheap clothes and handbags on sale there in stadium-sized malls that go on as far as the eye can see. It's a sad testament to prosperity that we need all this knock-off stuff and there's no doubt we are trashing the planet in our mad craving for $5 pashminas and $20 Vuitton bags. But last night, a documentary that screened on SBS called China Blue, brought it all home devastatingly. Directed by Micha Peled and filmed clandestinely, the documentary traces the lives of the young village girls - mostly teenagers and many as young as 14 - who are forced to leave their homes to live and work in the factories that produce everything from cheap jeans to luxury items for the big European and American labels.

While the cost of these expensive goods seem to be getting more and more expensive at the retail level in Paris and London, the cost of producing them is getting cheaper - and on the back of considerable human rights abuses. The girls are forced to live 12-to-a-room in dormitories and, homesick for their families, work punishing shifts, which can stretch to 48 hours at a time. (They are poked with sticks and their 8-cents an hour pay is docked radically if they fall asleep.) They rarely see the outside world, let alone have the opportunity to do the sort of thing normal teenage girls do. Workers are paid whenever the boss feels like it (sometimes they go for months without anything.) What's worse, the factories' clients - the American retail chains, the big European labels - only pay lip-service to the conditions of these workers. Time sheets and working conditions are falsified to satisfy the occasional enquiry from a western brand.

Next time you buy any fashions made in China, you might care to remember that the girlhood of hundreds of millions of teenagers has been sacrificed in the production of that trendy jacket you didn't really want anyway and will throw out next season. For God's sake, buy less stuff! And put pressure on the retail chains to only do business with factories that treat their workers in line with Western practises.

Putting it on

2006-12-05T17:20:00.000+11:00

I have very fond memories of the Ritz London. Years ago, when I was newby at Vogue Australia, I was sent to London to interview Barbara Cartland, the romance novelist, for her 80th birthday. Vogue didn't have a budget for the Ritz, or anything else much as it turned out, so I was lodged in the Royal Horseguards Hotel, where breakfast was included. Not being able to afford restaurant meals, I hit upon the brilliant idea of making my one other meal of the day aftrenoon tea at the Ritz. For four pounds I could eat as much as I liked in the most glamorous of surroundings - better than a cheap curry in a dismal Indian dive. But things are quite different these days, I believe. Ruth Jones, Director of Sales & Marketing at the Ritz, in Sydney to celebrate the hotel's centenary, tells me that tea costs almost ten times that much these days and that guests need to book up to twelve weeks ahead if they want to dine on weekends. I suspect it's still a bargain, though - especially if the waiters are still as keen to ply you with food. If you're thinking of taking tea at the Ritz you can now book online. Of course, if you're a guest at the hotel, tea tables are reserved for you upon checking in. Which, I suppose, might make it the most expensive cup of tea in London.

Shooting ourselves in the face

2006-12-03T15:44:00.000+11:00

The following is the text of my most recent Deeply Superficial column in the (sydney) magazine and the (melbourne) magazine, December issues:

They call it the gift that keeps on lifting. It seems as if the hot stocking-stuffer for Christmas in our enlightened age is a voucher for Botox injections or one of the other non-surgical cosmetic procedures that every second shopfront is offering these days. Daughters give it to their mothers, wives to husbands, girlfriends to girlfriends, apparently. While I haven’t actually met anyone who has done this, I can believe it. After all, the physicians and beauticians who wield the needles have done a darn good job of positioning what they do as a “lifestyle choice,” no different to colouring your hair.

So when New York’s Baron of Botox, Dr. Frederic Brandt, came to Australia on a whirlwind tour to promote his range of skin care products and offered media tarts a complimentary taste of what he does best, I thought about it for a minute. I’ve been holding out for many years. In my humble opinion, by locking ourselves into a lifetime of expensive needles and laser beams we’re shooting ourselves in the foot as much as in the face. Our character lies in our faces. If this society is in denial of age then maybe it’s better to get over it – because a lot of us are getting old - and find beauty in what we have.

But I realise I have been sounding like a Luddite on this subject for quite a while now. So I considered Dr. Brandt’s offer. A friend, experienced in these matters, told me I was mad not to. “He’s the best.” But then my husband, bless him, said ”Don’t you dare.” And I discovered something interesting. While many women are tempted, their men are terrified of it, afraid their wives will get hooked on the stuff and end up like the frozen-faced mummies on E!News, their tender expressions of love and concern obliterated as if they were Stepford Wives. When I showed up at Dr. Brandt’s suite at the Hilton hotel for an interview, a publicist confided that I was not the only journalist whose husband had nixed the idea.

Dr. Brandt in person is an altogether charming man who, as expected, looks like Peter Pan crossed with one of the children from The Sound of Music. He certainly doesn’t look or sound like an evil doctor bent on turning us all into cyborgs. When asked him if what he did was exploitative of his patient’s insecurities, he didn’t mind the question. “I look at it in a positive way. I think if we didn’t care how we looked we wouldn’t cut or colour our hair. Sometimes it’s good to have a little vanity because it makes you feel better about yourself. Obviously, if you’re really insecure you’re still going to feel insecure regardless of what you do. Our job as doctors is to guide people in the right directions and if we can make improvements that are natural then that’s nice. Hopefully we can make people feel better but it’s not a panacea for everything that ails you.”

Dr. Brandt sounds so reasonable, I ask him if I were to consider a procedure, how should I go about it. “Botox is a nice introduction because it has very little recuperation time, you don’t get much swelling or bruising,” he advises. “If you’re new at it only try one procedure at once and not too many areas. See how you like it. If you’re little nervous start with a small amount, you can always come back for more. Complications are rare and it’s reversible.” Naturally, he advises going to a physician not a beauty parlour. Problems can arise from the injections being done incompetently. And you don’t necessarily know what is in the product being injected.

I come away from the meeting unsullied, but with a clutch of Dr. Brandt’s products (available at Mecca Cosmetica nationally), which are designed to use in between procedures or instead of them. “You see these women who have had three facelifts and their skin looks like old skin because they have not taken care of it. You have to maintain health of the skin and texture of the skin,” he warns. And, that of course, includes staying out of the sun. But, he adds, “No cream is going to have the effects of Botox. If they tell you that they’re lying.”

A teeny weeny Aquatini

2006-11-24T07:26:00.000+11:00

The hunt for the world's great cocktails is exhausting, but I do my best. At right, a photograph of the "Aquatini" I imbibed at Aqua Spirit in Kowloon, Hong Kong, one Typhoon-sodden evening last June. At $25 a pop it's a tad pricey but it is iced with gold leaf. Re HK: Is there another city in the world that caters so well to the fashion obsessive? If so, I don't know of it. I mean, you can buy individual Armani chocolates for $6 a piece at Chater House. My advice is go during the famous shopping festival (June through August 31) when the Armani chocolates are still $6 but everything else is discounted up to 80%. You can read my story on shopping pornography in Hong Kong in the December issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller, out now.

The explosive lip gloss

2006-11-22T13:11:00.000+11:00

This morning, I called Emirates airlines to check whether I was able to bring into the cabin with me my usual stash of moisturisers, facial sprays and lip-glosses. Apparently, the restriction of liquids in hand luggage only applies to flights going to the UK or USA, so I can happily spritz away from Sydney to Muscat. I got caught up in this security nonsense in August, when I was flying out of New York. (Mind you, the security people at JFK airport completely missed the finger-sized tube of La Prairie face cream I'd smuggled into my luggage with the intention of mixing it with the dressing that comes with the economy-class salad and making an explosive device - and, please, joking about this is not an arrestable offence if you're sitting at home at your desk, so back off Attorney-General's Department). I don't intend to say more about this nonsense, which rivals "duck and cover" as one of the great scams in the history of keep-em-scared-and-tame propaganda but I do refer you to the erudite Patrick Smith of Salon's Ask the Pilot column who beautifully debunks the whole Pythonesque farce we passengers are so passively accepting. (And here is Patrick's latest hilarious column on the subject, posted for Thanksgiving.)

Sheltering Sky Blue

2006-11-22T12:35:00.000+11:00

I'm getting into a Sheltering Sky mood for my impending trip to Oman this weekend. I intend to have my hands and feet decorated with henna when there, as I usually do when visiting oriental countries (or anywhere else I can get it - I once had mehndi done in a shop in Manhattan's East Village), so the crucial decision before I go is this: what colour to paint my toenails? Quite coincidentally, yesterday the kind people at YSL sent me a bottle of next autumn's nail colour, no 32, a sparkling deep raspberry colour. But is it too Glam Rock for the dusty streets of Muscat? I was thinking more along the lines of desert shades like OPIs "It's a bird it's a plane it's OPI" orange (who thinks up these names?) or the Sheltering Blue Sky of M.A.C 's "Cabana". Perhaps I should paint my toes gold to go with my gold silk caftan or sinister purple-black (OPI's Lincoln Park) to go with my black one... This is an important decision, as I never feel quite right unless I've matched my toenail colour to my destination, in the same way I need to match my reading matter to my destination. (Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy for Romania; Rohan Mistry's A Fine Balance for India and now Sultan in Oman by Jan Morris, written when she was a "he" in 1957.) Maybe I should try a date-coloured brown? Or - let's take this to its logical conclusion - camel-poop yellow?

Not in the third world anymore, baby

2006-11-18T13:18:00.000+11:00

It's been a bad week for Romanians. First off, the villagers of Glod, from south-west Romania, discover that they have unwittingly doubled for Kazakhs in the new Borat movie. Then, that adorable spitfire Naomi Campbell accuses her maid, Gaby Gibson, of being a "stupid" Romanian and hurls the insult, "You're not in the third world anymore." In light of this I feel I must come to the defense of Romania, a beautiful country I discovered last year, where the wine is cheap, the food terrible, the countryside feudal, the trains always late, the toilet facilities challenging - in fact, one of the most enchanting places I've visited in a long while. Bucharest, in particular, still has the shabby glamour of yesteryear with dusty shops, Communist-era beauty parlours, cobblestone streets, crumbling medieval basilicas and bullet-ridden public buildings. I love it! Go before the country's entry into the EU turns it into one big Vuitton/Armani/Chanel outlet. And stay at the lovely Hotel Capsa, in the centre of town, a favourite of the king. Above, a bridal shop in Bucharest. (There are many.)

George W = sexually dysfunctional Clyde?

2006-11-16T10:22:00.000+11:00

Bless Al Gore for imprinting on my brain one of the funniest (and apt) images about our dear Prime Minister's sycophantic - or is it psychofantic - increasingly isolated and altogether weird relationship with the American president. (I mean, they are going to Vietnam this week to discuss Iraq?) “Right now, Australia and the United States are the 'Bonnie and Clyde' of the global community on the climate crisis," Gore told Andrew Denton on Enough Rope in September. "If Bonnie goes straight and reforms, then Clyde is out there isolated and would feel a lot of pressure to change. If Australia changed its policy, it would put enormous pressure on the US to change." Back in Australia to recruit volunteers for a new campaign, Gore reminded us of the quote at his press conference. Wonder how Mr. Howard looks in a beret?

Abstract Expressionism Rocks

2006-11-16T09:51:00.000+11:00

Oh, to be in New York tonight for the opening of a major exhibition of new works by "the painter's painter" Thornton Willis, whom I have had the privilege of knowing for a decade.

Thornton Willis was born, raised and educated in the South, completing his Masters work at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He moved to New York City in 1967 to pursue his career as an artist where he still lives and works.

This new group of paintings is a continuation of the dialogue with painting that Thornton began in those early years. His use of the triangle and strong diagonals has become a familiar trademark in his work. Here he continues the process of reexamination and refinement.

"I have always given credit to my influences, in particular to the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, which opened the door for what I call ‘Real Painting’," he says "and to those more contemporary artists whose dedication, work and focus have informed my art and created for it a historical context. For me, American Abstract Painting always has been, and remains, the most advanced means of visual expression available to a free society.”

Thornton has shown extensively in New York and in Europe and has work in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, the Powers Collection in Sydney, but to name a few.

This must-see opportunity to view Thornton's work is at the elizabeth harris gallery 529 w20 st ny 10011. Phone 212 463 9666. Closes December 22. The Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 11 – 6. For further information please contact Miles Manning at 212 463-9666.

The Bono Bonus

2006-11-13T07:44:00.000+11:00

Lucky me, having tickets to last night's Kylie show where U2 lead and all round good guy Bono made a surprise appearance. Just as well he did, really, because it's the only thing that stuck in my head from the whole extravaganza - except for that near-naked male dancer with the dark curly hair. Not that a lot of it wasn't calculatedly fabulous, mind you, but it was half an hour too long, and no amount of ostrich feathers and stage hydrolics could disguise the thinness of the material. For two-thirds of the night I was entertained enough to think, well, Kylie sounds more like a budgie than ever but there's almost something Chinese Opera about her voice that's kinda cool. And there's a joy to her performance these days that no amount of window-dressing can swamp. But there's no depth beyond chirpiness and it palls after a while. There were a lot of old Madonna references - including a few bars from "Vogue" - and I don't think it's that wise for Kylie herself to beg the comparison. Madonna gets on a wave just before it's about to crest, but Kylie is definitely riding it in the backwash, when we've seen it all before. Ironically, it's this lack of pretension that she's anything but middle-of-the-road that gives her charm. As for the audience, it was a mixture of seven year-old girls in pink glitter, gay boys in pink glitter and middle-aged women with pink feathers in their hair. But mostly it was a sea of Kath and Kims, proving once and for all the brilliance of Jane Turner and Gina Riley in casting Kylie in series two as Epponnee-Rae.

Belinda Emmett

2006-11-11T11:12:00.000+11:00

On a weekend when Kylie is boldly making her comeback from illness, the sad news that actress Belinda Emmett, who was only 32, has died from breast cancer. I saw her at Westfield only two or three weeks ago and she looked exceptionally frail. She was a lovely actress, with a real flair for comedy, and by all accounts a very dear person. Young girls need to know that vigilance is necessary. Go here for more information on breast cancer prevention.

Saving Face

2006-11-11T08:42:00.000+11:00

Isn't life wonderfully rich and unexpected? Just as I was getting myself into a funk about the state of the world, what lobs across my desk but the latest offering from that kooky gang at Chanel? Really, this is a must-have: a box of one hundred bunny-soft Egyptian cotton makeup remover squares, embossed with the Chanel logo! It's too exquisite. You could pay $2 for something similar at Woolworth's but it wouldn't be as soft, it might scratch your skin and it doesn't have the Chanel cachet. And, let's face it, $22 is very little to pay for a bit of Coco in the bathroom.

Having a Rum time

2006-11-11T08:09:00.000+11:00

From my friend Mark Trevorrow via YouTube, this hilarious Rummy spoof from Craig Ferguson's TV talk show. I've been silent on the matter of this week's US elections because there isn't a hell of a lot to celebrate, given the Iraq fiasco is still continuing and no hope in sight that John Howard will check his ego and admit what a debacle it is. (Mind you it is rather lovely to see the new, pained look on his face - although it's small comfort in light of the looks on 150,000 dead Iraqi faces.) But the Democrats win was something, eh? I almost have faith in Democracy again. In a couple of weeks I'm off to Oman, which is one of only two Sultantates in the world, and I'd like to see how that works. I rather fancy the idea of having a Sultana instead of a Queen.

If it walks like Kylie, smells like Kylie, then...

2006-11-09T08:51:00.000+11:00

Spoilt beautynistas got the pink carpet treatment last night and went home from the launch of Kylie Minogue's first fragrance, Darl, with a swag of goodies that attest to the commercial juggernaut that is the petite cancer survivor's post-op career. Included in the stash - one copy of book The Showgirl Princess: A true fairy tale full of glitter and dreams, one 2CD/DVD Special Edition: Ultimate Kylie, one pair Foxy Fishents LK Legs by LoveKylie, one 75ml bottle eau de toilette Kylie Minogue Darling, one Official Kylie Minogue Calendar 2007, two tickets to Sunday's Showgirl Homecoming Tour. The announcement of the last elicited gasps and applause from the pink champagne- sodden, gift-saturated crowd - testament to the fact that Kylie, who made a graceful appearance in the chic-est black dress, is still Australia's darl.

I work for shoes

2006-11-08T08:38:00.000+11:00

Word this morning that Imelda Marcos is turning her old clothes and shoes into a new fashion collection, produced with her daughter Imee. Which gives me the opportunity to now pass on one of my favourite quotes from the apparently much-wronged former First Lady of the Philippines: "I did not have three thousand pairs of shoes, I had one thousand and sixty." So there. Glad we've got that right.

Hatastrophe

2006-11-07T08:00:00.000+11:00

I'm a Melbourne girl, so today, Melbourne Cup Day, always brings a frisson of nostalgia. And a litle moue of annoyance that people persist in getting hats so wrong. I read that the Fascinator was "out" this year, which must have meant a crisis of sorts in the estimable closets of suburban Melbourne. What will stylish Melbourne women do without a bit of net and feather to stick on their heads? Will they have to wear brims? Appropriately, if they have to run around like a pack of chooks with their heads cut off, they do it in a place called The Birdcage. In the old days, we had sandwiches and champagne out of our car boot and some of us even went down to the finishing line to watch the race. These days, people boast they haven't seen a horse for years. Now they like to huddle in tents and pretend they are in Versailles, surrounded by courtiers and kings, rather than the same old Sydney set who has just transferred to Melbourne for the week. (And, by the way, don't the sponsors who have taken Marie-Antoinette as a theme this year know that Sophie Coppola's movie is reportedly a dud according to the world's best film critic, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker?) Pity, they miss the genuine thrill of those horses thundering down the straight and the smell of turf being hoofed up. Love it.... As a little token of the day I offer up an illustration of a very chic hat by the divine Richard Gray, which appears in my book Perfect Pink Polish.

Raining on our parade

2006-11-04T07:35:00.000+11:00

Ironically, it's a foul and unseasonably cold day in Sydney this morning. But that's no excuse not to pull on galoshes and join GetUp's Walk Against Warming throughout Australia today.

The Passionate Shopper

2006-11-04T07:11:00.000+11:00

I'm a bit of a Passionate Op Shopper myself, but I just love Marion von Adlerstein's lighthearted and juicy romp through the world's best shops, souks and bazaars, with a little help from 17 of her well-travelled friends. The book was royally launched on Wednesday night with pink Moet and lobster sandwiches at the new Hermes store on Sydney's Market Street. I arrived to find publisher Julie Gibbs receiving a lesson in scarf folding, Parisian style, from the adorable Liliane - and learnt a few things myself about how to make those clever knots and drapes as French women do. (Not sure what I did during my two years in Paris, but I never learned this.) The event was a bit of a nostalgia trip for ex-Vogue staffers like me, with three legendary Vogue women in the room - Marion, former editor June McCallum and former publisher Eve Harmon. Wandering among the expensive handbags was quite a sobering experience. Kick me in the head if I'm wrong here, but I thought the idea of owning a classic bag like the Hermes Birkin was that you wore it forever, it was the only bag you needed and it got better with the patina of time. But these days, handbag queens are buying a new bag at least every season (and often every week.) It's all about the bag the fashion magazines keep on telling us. Sorry babes, for me it's all about a lot of other things but never a bag.

The Doctor's Advice

2006-11-01T08:21:00.000+11:00

Dr. Who fans might recall the Doctor's effective way of getting rid of the British Prime Minister in an early episode of the last series. There was nothing supernatural about it. All he need do was whisper in the right ear, "Doesn't she look tired?" Well, given John Howard's recent performances on both Iraq and climate change, where has well and truly painted himself into a corner, I'd just like to say one thing: Doesn't he look tired?

The crack of evil

2006-10-31T09:25:00.000+11:00

It's Halloween, that time of the year when the fissure between earth and hell opens for a moment and all the nasty things sneak out. That's why we need to spook them back where they belong by wearing ghoulish Philip Ruddock and Alexander Downer masks. The crack of evil is supposed to open for only a nanosecond on All Hallows Eve, according to Celtic legend - but why do I get the feeling it was prised open long ago - let's say around Halloween 2000 - and never entirely slammed shut again? I might paint my toenails black in protest today - to match the cloud of CO2 emmissions that is going to get me anyway. At left, a pictorial offering from my trip to Dracula's birthplace in Romania last year.

A whiter shade of female

2006-10-28T09:56:00.000+10:00

The following is the text of my Deeply Superficial column in this month's (sydney) and (melbourne) magazines:
A few weeks ago, I was strap-hanging in a crowded New York subway car thinking about the colour of my skin. It was difficult not to in this situation – I was the only white person in the car. And I was very white, having come from Australia’s winter to the middle of a heatwave in Manhattan. Just to make me feel even more different, the occupants of the car were jiving to blues played by an old musician sitting on a crate. He’d play a few bars and then ask his audience to guess which singer performed the tune. “Who made it?” he’d call out. I jived along with the rest of them. And then he turned to me. “White lady,” he said. “This one’s for you. Don’t none of the rest of you tell her who it is.” He played a few bars. It was something very famous. Panicked, I said the first thing that came into my head. “Otis Redding?” Everyone looked at me in pity. “No!” yelled the musician. “Tina Turner before Ike hit her!” My fellow passengers dissolved into laughter. The song was Proud Mary. Now I felt really White.

But I digress… I’m thinking about white skin, as I always do this time of the year, when fake tans beckon. I’ve travelled a lot in the past year and most of my journeys have taken me to places where I’ve felt very blonde and very white – Rajisthan in India, Beijing in China, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, Huvafen Fushi in the Maldives, Harlem in New York. Unfortunately for some travellers, skin colour has become such an issue these days that if you’ve got the wrong one you’re likely to have your fellow passengers gang up on you and throw you off the plane. So it’s rather instructive - and humbling – to move outside your comfort zone and become the “other,” the odd one out. I had a wonderful time in Harlem, where people seem more courteous, friendly and good-humoured than the rest of Manhattan, but on one occasion I walked into a Black Power shop, where a fab teeshirt of Angela Davis had caught my attention, and the sales assistant froze me out with her glare. (Too much bad history, I suppose.)

This summer, white New Yorkers seemed obsessed with becoming brown, taking to solariums to get a deep, nuggetty tan which would horrify most Australians. But we’re an odd planet – in Hong Kong, I was gobsmacked by the shelves of skin-whitening products in department stores and pharmacies. The obsession to be pale in Asian countries mirrors the obsession to be golden tan in the west.Over the past year, skin-whitening products such as SK-II Whitening and Clinique’s Derma White have become available in Australia. It’s not so much that we want to become whiter it’s just that we like what colour we have to be free of age spots and irregular pigmentation, to be radiant and luminous, to use the two favourite buzzwords of the industry.

“Whitening” is a bit of a misnomer. All skins produces melanin when exposed to UV rays. When there is too much melanin – caused by sun exposure or hormonal changes – the skin is unable to decompose it and so it remains in clusters or blotches on the surface. Whether you’re yellow, light brown, caramel or pink, there’s an argument that “whitening” products will work for you in evening out your skin tone and reducing visible sun damage.Right now, with the warm weather here, I’m trying Clarins Radiance Plus Self Tanning Body Lotion on my legs and SK-II Whitening Source on my face. It’s a bit schizophrenic, I know. I’m conditioned to think my face should be white but my body golden. I suspect it’s something to do with the idea that being tan makes you look slimmer.

Is that the sound of my proudly black soul sisters up in Harlem chuckling?

Revenge of the Wrinklies?

2006-10-26T11:04:00.000+10:00

"For years, it has been the widespread practice throughout the beauty industry to promote the attainment of wrinkle-free, youthful skin by using wrinkle-free, youthful models. While the styling and the settings – children, puppies, windswept beaches - have suggested that the models are in that great, indeterminate 20-35 age group, in many cases they have been teenagers or very young women ... After all, we have been force-fed for years the idea that a woman’s skin is “perfect” when she’s 12 and it’s all downhill from there." Read the rest of my column on the trend to older models in this month's Australian Women's Weekly, out today.