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There are some beauty trends the ’90s can keep: ultra-skinny brows, silver lipstick, greasy tendrils… But it seems that chunky blonde highlights have clawed their way back. And actually, we’re not mad about it.

Like all the biggest hair trends of 2019, from the bob to the shag, the rebirth of chunky blonde highlights took place on Instagram. Colourists are moving away from the seamless blending techniques synonymous with pretty, flowing balayage and gravitating to a style that’s a lot more obvious and rigid. No, this isn’t Nick Carter’s seriously stripy curtains or Buffy’s streaky layers. This time around, chunky highlights have undergone a handful of modern twists: hair isn’t brassy-tinged, dyed strands are no smaller than finger width, nothing is too close to the root or zebra-esque, and hair is all one, blunt length.

Lots of colourists are taking a leaf out of Kardashian hairstylist Andrew Fitzsimons‘ book and mixing up hues with biscuit and caramel undertones, leaving negative space in between and stopping a few inches short of the root. Others are winging it with much brighter blonde tones but with one important rule in mind: the bulkier, the better. And the cut of choice? A shoulder-skimming lob, aka long bob.

“Previously, colour has been about making hair look natural,” said Adir Abergel, hairstylist and creative director of Virtue. “But this doesn’t support a haircut,” he continued. “The reason we’re seeing all of these highlights and chunky colour placements is to prop up a blunt cut. We saw this in the ’90s with the supermodels like Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Naomi Campbell. When they swooped their hair over, you could really see the movement.”

Luckily, I already had a blunt lob (the result of lazily skipping trims to keep my very high maintenance bob in check) and as someone with virgin (undyed) hair, I figured highlights would be the best way to ease myself in to the colour club. Interestingly, friends and family tried to deter me from touching my chocolate brown lengths. “You’ll really have to keep on top of maintenance,” warned one friend. Another said: “Don’t you think those highlights are a bit…severe?”

Of course, I didn’t listen to any of them (what kind of beauty editor would I be if I didn’t put my own hair on the line?) and on a recommendation, I booked in for half a head of highlights with Shannon Gallacher at Nicola Clarke at John Frieda. In 10 minutes my colour was mixed with a dose of Virtue Colorkick, a smart protein treatment which enlists human keratin to prevent breakage. Shannon backcombed my hair at the root to make the blend a little less blocky and more wearable, and used her hands to paint on the colour before wrapping each chunk of hair in a large sheet of foil.

Despite initial fears that I’d be sitting in the salon chair for hours on end, the dyeing process took around two. “Virgin hair will lift fairly quickly,” mentioned Adir, who also advises asking for a low peroxide dye, so that you aren’t blowing up the cuticle too much.

The initial result was bright, brassy yellow. Naturally, I panicked. The effect was more bumble bee than ’90s cool. But 30 minutes slathered in toner dialled it down to this noticeable but not too in-your-face blonde – and I’m feeling it! I opted for a dead straight blow-dry to continue the ’90s theme, as anything tousled would look a bit old-school.

While my hair doesn’t feel dry as a result of bleach, it does need extra care. I picked up Pureology Hydrate Colour Care Shampoo, £19.95, and Conditioner, £23.10, which are pricier than high street versions but leave my thick hair frizz-free and feeling like silk. After towel-drying, I apply two pumps of Kérastase Elixir Ultime Rose Hair Oil, £43, and comb through Aveda Heat Relief Thermal Protector and Conditioning Mist, £26, before blow-drying straight, going over it with straighteners. Hairstylists up and down the country are wincing, I’m sorry. I finish off with a puddle of Virtue Polish Un-Frizz Cream, £19, to smooth down flyaways at the root and any fluffy ends.

When it comes to maintaining ’90s chunky highlights, Adir reveals it’s not as bad as you might think. “You may have to go back in a month or so, as the colour could become lighter than you want or even a little bit brassy,” he told me. “For this reason, I’d suggest booking in for a toner every three weeks to a month, which is a 30-minute process,” something Shannon seconds.

Booking in for regular treatments is a bit of a faff, though, so in the meantime I’ve stocked up on BLEACH London Toner Kit, £9, and Redken Blondage Express Anti-Brass Mask, £24.65, to keep my blonde bright. Using a purple shampoo, mask or treatment once or twice a week is also a good shout, according to the pros, so I have John Frieda’s Sheer Blonde Colour Renew Tone Correcting Purple Conditioner, £5.99, on hand for a quick in-shower fix, too.

Before you commit to nostalgic chunky highlights, there’s one important thing Adir wants you to know. “As you can see specifically where the placement of the highlights are, you have to commit to where you’re going to part your hair,” he said. “Otherwise, the finished result could look odd and unsymmetrical.” I’m unadventurous and stick with a centre parting, so that was easy, but if you like to switch up your style or wear your hair in a bun or ponytail, this is definitely something to consider.

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In 2019, you could argue that we have reached peak influencer. Where once our Instagram feeds were a slideshow of overly edited sunsets and hotdog legs, now we’re greeted by image upon image of product placements, flawless #OOTDs and that ubiquitous flower wall. Influencer culture has given us viral dresses, elaborately planned wedding stunts and, most notably, Fyre Festival: a stark reminder of the power of internet marketing and influencer endorsement. Kendall Jenner was reportedly paid $250k simply for posting about the three-day event.

While critics claim that the era of the influencer is waning thanks to millennial ‘influencer fatigue’, the global industry is projected to hit $2.38 billion this year. In the UK alone, it’s predicted that accounts with 1 million followers can command £10,000 for one Instagram post, whereas mega influencers can enjoy six-figure revenues.

What does it really mean to make your living from the internet, all while dealing with daily death threats, difficult PRs and inconsistent payments? We talked to beauty influencer and OG blogger Hayley Hall to learn about the industry, warts and all.

When did you start getting into beauty blogging and why?

I started nearly a decade ago. I was working as a brand manager for a cosmetics brand and these things called ‘blogs’ kept cropping up in our internal discussions. I was intrigued and, in an arrogant way I guess, I thought I could do just as good a job myself. My first posts weren’t very sophisticated – I wrote about things like my favourite nail varnishes and the hot pink lipstick trend – but within four months I was nominated for a Cosmo Blog Award.

What do you love most about your job?

The fact I work for myself and have the power to say no. If I don’t want to work with a brand, a PR or on a campaign, it’s my choice alone. I love the fact I set my working week up to suit my lifestyle and working patterns too.

And what do you hate the most?

The instability, the constant justification of your existence and value, and chasing invoices!

When did it start to get serious?

At first it honestly was never my intention to turn my hobby into a job. I remember my boss at the time asking if it would ever happen and I practically laughed in his face! When I did go full-time it was by accident. My job at the time at an ad agency in London got too much and I needed a total lifestyle change, so I left the job and the city, and gave myself six months to find something new. During that time, I started putting more into my blog and treating it like a business, and it really took off. That was six years ago, and I’ve been full-time ever since.

I know no day is typical but for people who are curious, what does your average day look like?

No two days are ever the same, but usually I get up about 8am and check social media, maybe post on Instagram or upload an Insta Story of me doing mundane things like having breakfast with my hamster (it’s those random, silly things people love the most). Once the postman has been, I’ll have a look at the new samples that have arrived and sort them into piles of what I want to try, and what can go to friends or family. Most of the time I’m working from home, so I am usually at my desk by 10am to clear my inbox and work on any urgent things on my to-do list. That may be working on sponsored content, taking photos, editing videos, working on proposals or reading through and amending contracts. A lot of the time I tend to pop out to a coffee shop for a change of scenery, especially when I need to concentrate, so often afternoons are spent there either writing, brainstorming or working on client projects.

I tend to be in London around once a week for press appointments, events or meetings, and this literally involves talking through a new product, discussing how we could potentially work together, or putting together an action plan. My husband now takes all my photos so often our evenings are spent taking photos or filming videos; weekends are also usually filled with at least one photoshoot for social and blog content.

What’s the biggest misconception about beauty bloggers and influencers?

There’s a perception that being an influencer isn’t a ‘real job’ or is a ‘lazy girl’s option’ but honestly it’s non-stop because there’s nobody to pick up the slack if you have an off day, fall ill or want to take a holiday. About 80% of my working week is unpaid too, which nobody seems to realise. People often think that success comes easily and that all we do all day is faff around taking photos of ourselves. To be successful you not only have to be a great writer, editor and photographer, you must also be a great storyteller and have a fresh perspective. Knowing how to negotiate and keeping on top of your accounts is hugely important, too.

What do your non-blogger friends and family think about your job?

They’re fascinated and baffled in equal measure. For a long time they didn’t really understand my job, but now they’re super supportive. My mates will now offer to take photos, scout out locations or send me links to things they think I’d like.

Everyone wants to know about money… How much do you make now? And what do brands pay for a post?

It really depends on what you’re doing and the influencer in question, as well as who books you for the campaign. I’ve earned anything between £90 and £10,000 for a single day’s work.

Have you ever struggled with money?

When I first started doing this full-time money was tight and I worried constantly. Six years on, though, I’ve grown enough of a presence to have a basic regular income that I can somewhat rely on. There’s a huge misconception that influencers earn a ton of money, and it’s not true for 95% of us – plus it takes years to get to that level.

What about late payments?

Constantly! I have to write off thousands of pounds every single year, for one reason or another. Brands often forget to process your invoice, or it’s left on someone’s desk too long, and you have to be prepared for that. Living on the edge is not an option when you don’t know when you’re next getting paid!

Surely that stress can have a really bad effect on your mental health?

Honestly, it can be a struggle. I’ve spent many nights lying awake worrying about money – when I’m going to get paid, whether I can cover my tax bill – but it’s just part and parcel of the self-employment package. It does get easier and more manageable the longer you do it, and over the years I’ve learned to focus my anxious energy into actively seeking new projects and constantly chasing invoices until they’re paid. In this job there’s no sick pay, holiday pay or maternity pay either. The lifestyle and career path are not for everyone, and I would definitely say if you’re not a proactive or confident person, it may not be the right choice for you. Or you should get an accountant and a ruthless bookkeeper!

Not every product you try is amazing, do you give negative reviews? Has that ever landed you in hot water with brands or PRs?

Yes, absolutely. I’ve never been afraid to pull any punches, and most of the time brands are understanding and thankful for the feedback. Now I tend to feature negative reviews on products that are hugely hyped – my readers know I’ll tell it like it is or say when something is a waste of money.

How important is it to be honest with your readers?

It’s vital! If you don’t have honesty, you don’t have integrity, and if you don’t have integrity you won’t last long in this job.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Hayley Hall (@hayleyhall_uk) on Aug 6, 2019 at 10:12am PDT

Do you think readers can tell when a blogger isn’t being ‘real’?

Yes, definitely. I think this is why Instagram Stories have taken off so much, because you get to see the ‘real’ side of an often glamorous-looking life; they provide a warts-and-all account of what really happens behind the scenes. It’s not all press trips and beautiful products, it’s also working until midnight on a campaign or going weeks without landing any paid work at all. It’s about having crappy days when you feel like a failure, having writer’s block for weeks, or being constantly picked apart by anyone over 40 because they don’t understand what you do.

Do you have any overly enthusiastic followers? And how do you deal with that?

Yes, it’s always flattering when someone gets super involved in your life, but occasionally it can start to feel a bit uncomfortable. If it passes that line then I’ve found the best way to deal with it is to just back off slightly, but always remain polite. I’ve learned that I don’t need to reply to every single comment or message, and usually they get the hint and remember that they don’t actually know you in real life. If it gets really bad, the mute and block buttons are your friends!

What kind of relationship do you have with PRs?

Honestly, working with PRs can be amazing but it can also drive you mad. Some are incredible and really understand the need for a mutually beneficial and long-term relationship, putting next to no pressure on you, but others will send a list of demands or harass you three times a week for coverage. I know they’re only trying to do their job, but it can get too much. I’ve been known to deliberately not feature a product I was intending to, just because they emailed me so often! My get out of jail free card is always to send them my media kit and explain if they want guaranteed coverage, it comes with a fee.

 What has been your most lavish gift from a brand?

I mean, I don’t think you can get better than being flown to New York to interview Michael Bublé, can you?

Have you ever seen any diva behaviour from others at events or on press trips?

Oh my goodness, yes. From demanding certain restaurants to extending their stay at the PR’s expense, refusing to sit next to certain people, being hours late, deliberately ignoring the rest of the attendees because they’ve got an ego… One writer I know even took all her dry cleaning to the hotel she was being hosted in and insisted the brand pay the bill, while another sent back a ‘thank you’ gift card and demanded the value be quadrupled because it was an ‘insulting amount’!

Have you ever had to deal with the nasty side of being an influencer, such as trolling or backlash?

I’ve been trolled so many times. Often, it’s just nasty comments about my appearance or weight, sometimes it’s incessant indirect comments about me being pregnant on every single blogpost for months, sometimes it’s nasty tweets because they don’t agree with something I’ve said. My favourite troll was one who was convinced I was a bigger size than I say I am and kept telling me so on every social channel – so for a week I sent her smiling pictures of my outfit and the size tag, until she blocked me. I like to play them at their own game!

The worst trolling I probably got though was when I broke the story that another big blogger had their book ghost-written. I had to come off Twitter for nearly two weeks because I was being told to kill myself and having horrible memes made about me by [the blogger’s] fans. Since starting my blog I’ve learned to remember that the issue is not with myself, but with them – whether they’re insecure, jealous, bitter or just unstable. A happy person doesn’t troll.

What do you think about the criticism that many influencers post similar images, that there is now a stereotype of the ‘typical’ influencer?

I think it’s a fair criticism and something I get frustrated over too. The problem is that this kind of content works, is prioritised by sites like Instagram and is what brands want to see associated with them. We can all try and do something different but if the sickly sweet floral arrangements work, then everyone starts to fall in line. But it will move on, and soon there will be a new pose or a new gimmick to try.

Do you think the influencer bubble will burst? And if it does, what are your plans for the future?

I think it’s inevitable. Like with everything digital, we move on to the next thing, and I don’t think the bubble bursting is that far away – we’re at peak influencer now, so there will be big changes. Trust between influencers and followers is at an all-time low and every Love Island contestant can become an influencer practically overnight. I think we’ll return to more valuable, long-form content soon, which is fine by me, as that’s where I’m best placed. When it does burst, I’ll go back to working in branding and marketing like I did before. I have 15 years of experience I can fall back on, and I have clients that I work on alongside my blog, so I’ll just go back to ‘normality’.

What is your best beauty advice?

Wear SPF every. Single. Day. Something like 90% of ageing is caused by the sun so if you can stop that happening as much as possible, your skin will look so much better in the long term.

What are your three desert island beauty products and why?

A Burt’s Bees lip balm because they’re amazing, a facial SPF (either ARK Skincare, Elizabeth Arden or Hawaiian Tropic) because of sun damage, and a pack of Invisibobble hair ties, because I’m always shoving my hair up out of the way.

Hayley blogs here or find her on Instagram @hayleyhall_uk

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“Let’s just say, wearing an outfit more than once is seen as a fashion crime,” says presenter Sukaina Benzakour. The 24-year-old is not alone in her opinion. Perhaps surprisingly, since sustainability seems to be on the tip of everyone’s tongue right now, one in three young British women consider clothes to be ‘old’ after just one or two wears. Research carried out for Barnardo’s earlier this year revealed that Brits were set to spend £2.7 billion on 50 million summer outfits that would be worn only once – on holiday or at events such as festivals and weddings.

“I only wear clothes once because usually if I have bought an outfit and gone out in it then I would’ve most definitely taken a picture in it,” Benzakour says. “I don’t like to be seen in the same outfit [twice]. I guess that’s shallow of me?”

Rachel* agrees. She sells her clothes on Depop after just one wear, stating in her bio: “I love all of these clothes but I hate wearing things more than once.” When asked why she hates it so much, she explains that she sells “the clothes I have photos in or that lots of people have seen me in at a big event. I like to take every chance to wear something different each time.”

While the stats focus on women, this is not a women-specific issue; a point that should not be overlooked given that the growth of the menswear market is set to outperform that of womenswear over the next three years. Zack Smith, a 24-year-old entrepreneur and socialite, cites the same reasons for ditching his clothes as the women I spoke to. “With social media it’s always [about] posting new content and you don’t want your followers to see you wear the same outfit,” he says. “When you attend any event it’s good to feel good and wear a new outfit.” 

Like Rachel, Smith intends to sell his clothes on Depop, with more than 20 bags of garments in his loft waiting to be listed. A quick scroll on the popular resale app reveals endless listings which reassure potential buyers that an item has only been worn once or, sometimes, just for a single photo.

While the resale market grows and many people do sell their clothes in order to make some money back, thereby giving them a new lease of life, plenty of others simply throw them away. Benzakour is one of them. “I usually just throw them out. It’s so bad of me I know but I just hate having so many clothes lying around and I know I’m not going to wear any of them. I literally have so many clothes just waiting to be thrown out as we speak,” she says.

She is aware of the impact of her actions. “It’s really bad of me to just throw clothes away,” she says. “It’s a waste of money and also bad for the environment as it means those items will end up in landfill. And to make matters worse, manmade fibres such as plastics or nylons don’t break down nearly as easily as natural fibres, such as cotton or wool.”

According to WRAP, £140 million worth of clothing is sent to landfill each year – equating to around 350,000 tonnes of unwanted garments – and Benzakour’s concerns about manmade fibres are not unfounded.

“Something which isn’t considered often is that since the rise of fast fashion, when polyester fabric use exploded, a lot of the clothing which is being sent to landfill is made from polyester,” says Rob Williams of clothing manufacturer Hawthorn. “Synthetic and non-biodegradable fibres, such as polyester, are used in around 72% of garments and can take 200 years to decompose. This polyester can now be recycled and reused by clothing manufacturers and other industries, so it’s a real shame that garments are getting sent to landfill when they can be easily recycled.”

Most of the people I spoke to for this article are intelligent and generally pretty aware that wearing something once and then getting rid of it isn’t great for our planet (the words ‘admit’ and ‘guilty’ came up a lot). So what exactly is driving such a throwaway attitude to their wardrobes?

In news that will surprise no one, social media is a key factor. “Social media plays a huge part,” says Smith. “You don’t want negative comments and messages off people saying, ‘You’ve worn that top before or outfit before,’ as I’ve had in the past.”

Alice Gividen, editor of WGSN’s global trend edit The Feed, echoes this. “Once an outfit has been ‘gridded’, there’s a real reluctance for shoppers to share the look again,” she says. “The gratification that comes with a new outfit is gone, as the compliments stop coming.”

As well as creating an expectation for ever more new outfits, by sharing a look once and once only, people are feeding into a never-ending cycle. They share an #OOTD for the likes or compliments, they scroll, they see another look, they buy that look…and so it continues.

“The concept of FOMO is sort of intrinsic to social sharing – and it’s impacting clothes and shopping habits,” Gividen continues. “Following the #OOTD hashtag introduces us to clothes we don’t have, or can’t afford – and fuels further consumption. As Instagram works to reduce friction on in-app paths to purchase, with the ability to now shop, checkout and manage orders all within the app, it makes buying this product easier than ever. While it is exciting that [Instagram] has democratised who actually is a tastemaker, with trends emerging from unlikely places, it just introduces us to, and creates demand for, even more product.”

And it can get expensive. Research by Nutmeg found that the average cost of an #OOTD on Instagram came to £731.90. Admittedly, they reached this figure by totting up totals based on influencers’ posts, which often feature donated designer gear, but even those who aren’t on the receiving end of generous #gifts can find themselves shelling out a fair bit. “Let’s just say it’s a very expensive habit. I would buy two outfits a week or even more. I couldn’t even tell you how much I’ve spent on clothes,” says Smith.

While Instagram certainly plays a part, there are psychological factors driving this hyperconsumerism, too. Professor Carolyn Mair writes in her enlightening book, The Psychology of Fashion: “As humans have developed and their basic needs are met, they experience greater motivation for belonging, esteem and self-actualisation. Fashion and fashion-related products can satisfy these needs… Comments and evaluations from others provide self-knowledge and can influence self-concept, self-identity and self-esteem.” In other words, clothes are important to how we see ourselves and how we believe others see us.

Clothes can ease social anxiety, act as a canvas for self-expression and engender a sense of belonging in the wearer. And the type of people who take these benefits from clothes – people who are concerned about their appearance and being ‘fashionable’ – tend to be more receptive to adverts which emphasise image, and willing to pay more for clothing than others, according to Mair.

We now see more advertisements in one year than people 50 years ago saw in a lifetime, which means we’re faced with constant prompts to buy new clothes. When we give in and buy these new clothes, we get a surge of dopamine, the ‘feel-good hormone’.

The habit of wearing clothes once and then chucking them may seem indefensible but when you begin to explore the reasoning behind it, a portrait of social pressure, psychological drivers and hormonal rewards emerges and it becomes easier to understand. Of course, understanding isn’t a free pass to carry on being wasteful but it should prompt us to look beyond the individual to the wider causes and potential solutions.

Wearing something once doesn’t seem so bad if it’s rented or borrowed from a friend, for instance; it’s throwing it away that’s the problem. In a shift that Business of Fashion has called “the end of ownership”, more and more brands are experimenting with rental models, tapping into the growth in popularity of dedicated rental platforms such as HURR and Onloan. “Rental, resale and refurbishment models lengthen the product lifecycle while offering the newness consumers desire,” said BoF, pointing to a potentially more sustainable solution than buying and chucking.

The individual isn’t off the hook here – it’s imperative that we reconsider our wasteful ways as well as questioning our motivations for buying. Yet systemic changes could help ease the overbearing social pressure to constantly acquire new stuff while allowing us to express ourselves through style and try new looks without leaving the planet drowning in discarded clothes.

*Name has been changed

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Why do we fall for fuckboys or girls? It’s the eternal question. Like Shakespearean Iagos for the Tinder age, they crave constant attention and if there’s a scandal, they’re almost always at the centre but miraculously never to blame.

Manipulative, infuriatingly charming, superficial, lacking in integrity and yet almost universally alluring – we just can’t help ourselves. After every encounter, we swear off them. A week later, all it takes is a “what are you doing?” text and we go back for more until one day they push us too far and, finally, we stop. Friends and family may have spent months, even years, begging us to stop putting ourselves through the emotional abuse, the gaslighting, the drama, the uncertainty and the pain but, all too often, it’s only when we reach breaking point that we cut the cord. 

It’s not just that we’re all masochists. As not one but two 2013 studies conducted by psychologists at the University of Durham and the University of Teesside found, it’s that people who display what’s known as the Dark Triad of personality traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy – are incredibly attractive to us. 

So attractive, in fact, that the women who participated in one of the pieces of research rated men who exhibited high levels of Dark Triad characteristics “significantly more attractive” than those who didn’t. 

However, it’s not just in our romantic relationships that we fall for the charms of arch manipulators. 

Recent research from the University of Exeter, which looks at the personalities of political elites has highlighted that – surprise – certain personality traits are more common among politicians. And while those in power were found to be generally low in traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness (which the researchers point out is linked to trust and trustworthiness), they were high in traits such as extroversion. More than this, in a separate study, people who are particularly ambitious were found to exhibit the Dark Triad personality model. 

So perhaps it’s no surprise that our new prime minister has managed, after a string of blunders, to make his way to Number 10. Britain fell in love with bad boy Boris Johnson a long time ago. He is a man who was fired from his job as a journalist – in which the key requirement is that you communicate facts to an audience – for lying, had multiple affairs despite being married with children and in 2004 got fired from a front bench role because of one of them. Yet still he continued to poll well. Still, him one day becoming prime minister was always talked about not in terms of “if” but “when”. 

I remember sitting in a suburban south London hairdresser’s with one of my mum’s friends shortly before the EU referendum and hearing her say that she was voting in favour of Brexit because of Boris. 

It didn’t seem to matter that throughout his entire career – professionally and personally – he had shown himself to be untrustworthy. She was prepared to place her faith and her future in his hands because, as she put it while swooning at the time, “he is just charming and intelligent”. 

As if his previous indiscretions weren’t enough, Johnson deliberately misused official statistics during the campaign for Brexit. He promised his country that “after leaving the EU, we will take back control of roughly £350 million per week” which, he said, we would spend on the NHS. In reality, the figure is more like £250 million and it’s now very clear that the economic impact of Brexit is already bigger than these savings, impressive as they might sound. 

But that’s the Dark Triad all over, isn’t it? Promising the world, dazzling you with grand ideas and big promises only to let you crash back down to Earth when a new conquest comes along. 

Since becoming prime minister, Johnson has compared himself to the Hulk with no irony, much to the exasperation of EU officials and the embarrassment of, well, even the Hulk himself. He has (perhaps deliberately) misled the queen to get his own way. He has faced down calls to resign after the Supreme Court ruled that he unlawfully prorogued parliament with the arrogance of an Old Etonian and the swagger of a man who knows that someone will always have him. He has invoked the memory of murdered MP Jo Cox, who was killed by a far-right terrorist at the height of the tensions caused by the anti-immigration rhetoric used by his own campaign to leave Europe, in an attempt to justify his political position. 

And as if all this wasn’t galling enough, when he was called out by Labour MP Paula Sherriff in the House of Commons who, while close to tears, told him that she was receiving death threats – including one against her child – which echoed his rhetoric about not “surrendering” and pushing ahead with Brexit, he simply replied: “I have never heard so much humbug in my life.”

The behaviour of the prime minister sets the tone for what else happens on the front benches. Culture trickles from the top down. Underneath Boris Johnson it looks like an ageing university rugby team are running wild, shouting “banter” at each other and getting drunk on power while forgetting that they only have senior jobs because there was – quite literally – nobody decent left for their boss to pick, because he expelled them from the Conservative party for voting against him. 

We’ve been forced to look on as the painfully posh Jacob Rees-Mogg lay down – yes, lay down – and lounged and lolled on the front bench in the Commons and appeared to snooze while the house was in session. At one of the most serious points in Britain’s history, can you imagine feeling entitled to do such a thing?

We’ve then heard the Attorney General Geoffrey Cox respond flippantly to a very serious question about whether the long-awaited Domestic Abuse Bill – which was put on hiatus by the proroguing of parliament – would now be pushed through by saying: “We might as well do something.” 

This attitude is disgusting, these are people’s lives. https://t.co/nIAuiw50Px

— Jess Phillips Esq., M.P. (@jessphillips) September 25, 2019

Two women die a week at the hands of an abusive partner. Two women a week. But, yeah, we might as well do something. 

The Dark Triad is familiar to us all. We know that the traits it describes enable politicians to self-promote and rise to powerful positions even if they may not actually be fit to hold them. But just as we fall for the charms of people we know are no good for us in our own lives, we keep letting them get away with it. 

Why has Britain continually forgiven men like Johnson? Why, despite his record, does he keep being handed opportunities? Why, even though he continues to let us down, does his stock seem to keep rising? When will we finally realise that we are in a toxic relationship with leaders like him and start backing people who are actually fit to lead us. You can’t look out for the wellbeing of anyone – let alone an entire nation – if you only care about yourself. 

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It took an instant for my entire life to change. When I look back, the memory is always black and white; spring flowers poking hopeful heads through the tangled grass on the verges, the line of vehicles snaking before me, the sky full of rolling clouds. I couldn’t tell you now what was on my mind as I waited for the traffic to clear. I couldn’t tell you whether I was hot or cold, happy or sad. But although the memory is hazy I can recall with absolute clarity the feelings; my mounting horror as a flash of movement drew my eye to my rearview mirror as a car hurtled around the bend, coming up behind me fast. Too fast.

The sickness in my stomach as I realised the driver was rummaging for something on her passenger seat, not looking ahead, not realising the traffic on this normally free-flowing road had ground to a halt. That deep gut knowing as I was violently thrust into the car in front that everything, from that moment onwards, would be irrevocably altered. My fragile health was always house-of-cards precarious and if my skeleton were stronger, perhaps I’d have walked away unscathed. As it was, the damage was such that I couldn’t walk away at all.

The first few weeks passed in a fog of pain medication which didn’t eradicate the excruciating agony I felt each time I moved. I was reliant on crutches and a wheelchair. My friends rallied round, as good friends do. My washing was hung out to dry, my carpets hoovered while I tried to cling on to a semblance of normality. With three children to look after I couldn’t allow myself to crumble, on the outside at least. On the inside I was dust, finding it harder to fight the increasing panic I felt every day. The same frenzied thought circling my mind: What if I can never walk properly again?

I couldn’t articulate what I was feeling; I was scared of voicing my fears and giving them shape and weight. Instead, my face was a mask, smile pinned into place each time a visitor came. My group of friends still gathered at mine as they always had, cups of coffee in hand, dunking biscuits, trading gossip, opinions on the soaps, weekend plans. I listened. Nodded. Smiled. Internally I was screaming. It all seemed so trivial. My joy had been left at the roadside along with the wreck of my car.

One day my friends arranged a night out. Come, it’ll do you good. Sweat prickled at my skin as anxiety about going out, being seen in public, overwhelmed me. A sea of faces gazed expectantly at me and although I didn’t feel ready, I found myself agreeing. Someone suggested our favourite bar, and it was left to me to say I didn’t think I’d manage the steep steps to the entrance. Another venue was offered as an alternative, this one I knew didn’t have a downstairs toilet. A third, no parking close by. Phones were pulled out, calls were made. Disabled access was checked and at last we found somewhere suitable. They left in a cloud of excitement, leaving me alone with the dirty mugs and my dread.

It was a disaster. The pub was too busy, there weren’t enough seats, we gathered around the bar, me painfully leaning on my crutches for support, unable to hold a drink and fighting off tears. There, in a heaving room full of people, full of my friends, I had never felt so invisible. So alone. I feigned a headache and left.

After that, there was a shift. A pulling away. It became apparent that whatever recovery I might make, it wouldn’t be a short road. Visits dwindled, mostly stopped. At the time, I thought the end of our friendship was their fault. I thought I was too inconvenient. Too different. Unable to socialise in the way I used to meant the group, if I were to be a part of it, had to make a change. They didn’t. I would torture myself daily with Facebook, scroll through posts, everyone tagged but me. I wasn’t invited to anything else.

Now, I believe that I am also to blame. My friends didn’t understand me because I didn’t give them the chance. Each time they asked how I was, my stock answer – “I’m fine” – was a lie and they must have known that, as I struggled to get out of my chair. When I couldn’t lift my own child. Perhaps they felt I didn’t trust them enough to be open, to let them in. But it was never a case of not wanting to let them in, I see that now. I pushed them away because I was gripped by shame. Shame that my body felt old, and tired, and not like theirs. Shame that I looked different with my crutches and my wheelchair. Shame that at that point in my life I needed more from others than I was able to give in return. Perhaps my friends valued me less because I valued myself less.

I have come to accept myself now, to love myself again. My health has improved, although I will likely never be pain-free or completely mobile again. I have learned that I still have friends. The best kind of friends who didn’t leave when I tried to push them. Who don’t care that I can’t get up and dance and run and walk for miles during marathon shopping sessions because I can talk. Listen. Laugh. I am more than my body. More than my disability. To anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation I’d say please don’t feel ashamed and don’t feel any less. Be honest about your limitations. Don’t push people away without giving them the chance to adapt along with you. You have so much more to offer than you might think.

The Family by Louise Jensen is published by HQ on 3rd October (paperback, ebook and audio).

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Lucy in the Sky had all the elements of a great movie: Natalie Portman! Space! A hot affair with Jon Hamm! A lurid, sensational true story involving a scorned lover, a diaper, and a drugstore wig! If not Oscar-worthy, it should, at the very least, have been mildly interesting. 

Reader, it is boring. 

Inspired by true events, Noah Hawley’s film is billed as an attempt to understand the motivations behind Lisa Nowak’s 2007 headline-grabbing stunt, when the decorated astronaut drove 900 miles to confront her former lover and his new girlfriend. Portman plays Lucy Cola, a character loosely based on Nowak, who has trouble adjusting to civilian life after a mission in space. That part is enough to grasp, and a fascinating premise to explore — how can you care about picking up dry cleaning when you’ve caught a glimpse of the larger universe? That larger existential question is supposed to elevate the sordid details of what comes next. 

Back on Earth, and unable to cope with the everyday grind, Lucy begins a steamy relationship with a fellow astronaut, Mark Goodwin (Hamm). Brawny, cocky, and thrilling, he’s in every way opposite to Lucy’s affable, supportive, and devout husband Drew (Dan Stevens). He also has the benefit of understanding what Lucy’s been through.As members of an ultra-exclusive club of “humans who have been to space and back,” they’re able to commiserate in a way that she and Drew, who works in NASA’s PR department, simply can’t, no matter how good his salad-making skills are. 

But as Lucy’s alienation gets more pronounced, her relationship with Mark unravels, and who moves on to a younger, more impressionable alternative: Lucy’s NASA colleague Erin Eccles (Zazie Beetz). (True story or not, it’s a disappointing twist that a woman who has achieved the physically and mentally demanding feat of going to space is eventually undone by her relationship with a man.) To add insult to injury, her male superiors deny her the opportunity of qualifying for the next mission, on the grounds that she’s not in the right mental state.

The real problem with Lucy in the Sky is that Hawley doesn’t seem to know what story he wants to tell. Is it a movie about a woman grappling with her own inconsequential existence in the face of a larger universe? About a relationship gone sour? About the systemic misogyny that allows women to be gaslit into believing they’re not good enough, even as their male colleagues progress? By not fully committing to any one of these threads, the movie doesn’t end up saying much of anything. 

Instead, you get the sense of a filmmaker who is desperately trying to be “deep.” Bird’s eye views of neighbourhoods abound — because Lucy’s head is still in the sky, get it? Character-building is replaced with the sound of deep, heavy breathing, and slow motion shots of levitating bodies. And don’t get me started on the woo-woo cover of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which plays over a shot of Lucy gliding through a hospital corridor, illustrating her complete detachment from the world around her. 

Elliott DiGuiseppi and Brian C. Brown’s screenplay, which Hawley revised, is equally empty. A compelling kernel of a story about a capable, professional women being gaslit by her male colleagues is drowned in the hysteria inexplicably written into Lucy’s character. Portman does her best to make her worthy of empathy, but we still get the sense that the film isn’t quite on her side. It’s hard to begrudge Mark’s email to a NASA supervisor claiming that she isn’t quite ready for another mission into space when everything she does appears to support that. A heartfelt speech to her niece, Blue Iris (Pearl Amanda Dickson) who’s been let down by her deadbeat father, about women having to step up in this world, rings hollow when it’s followed by Lucy essentially kidnapping her on her quest for revenge. 

That’s not to say that having an unsympathetic female protagonist is a bad thing — take Melissa McCarthy’s turn as the curmudgeonly and misanthropic Lee Israel in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, for example. But that doesn’t seem to be the intention here, which makes it all come off as a bungled, male-gazey interpretation of a woman’s suffering. 

Rather than exploit the kind of emotional ambiguity that could lead the audience to mistrust our own assumptions about Lucy, the movie presents a pretty clear-cut situation. But if that’s the case, Hawley should have gone full steam ahead — instead, he tries to side-step the “unhinged vengeful woman” trope” and thus omits the most publicised detail of the story: the diaper Nowak allegedly wore to avoid stopping for bathroom breaks on her drive.  By trying to protect Lucy from her own story, Lucy in the Sky patronises, rather than understands her. 

The weaker trappings of Lucy in the Sky can’t quite obscure what is ultimately a memorable Portman performance. With a bowl-cut mouse-brown wig, jean mini-skirt, and thick, chompy, Holly Hunter-accent, she could easily veer into caricature, but makes this role her own. 

She seamlessly transitions from quietly contemplating a sunrise one minute, to vibrating with raging purpose, dressed in her dead grandmother’s red cowboy boots, the next. In one particularly tense scene, Lucy is undergoing a training exercise in a deep pool when her helmet starts to leak. Even as water pours in, she remains calm, focusing on the task at hand until she has to be physically pulled away by her colleagues. She emerges, and just like Lucy, we’re left with a disappointing reality after a brief glimpse at the wondrous possibilities. 

Lucy In The Sky is out in the UK on 6 December 2019.

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Haircuts are notoriously stressful experiences, but if you thought asking your stylist for a trim was nerve-racking, imagine how Timothée Chalamet felt after he was told he had to get a bowl cut for his role in The King.

Fans were perplexed when Chalamet debuted the now-infamous look at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but it all made sense after the trailer for The King dropped in August: Chalamet’s cut was for his part as King Henry V in the Netflix historical drama that tells the story of Hal, a wayward prince and heir to the English throne.

The cut may be polarising now, but when filming for the movie based on Shakespeare’s play Henry V began, The King‘s makeup and hair designer Alessandro Bertolazzi knew it was necessary for the role. Although the original text has been adapted before (including in 1989’s Henry V starring Kenneth Branagh, and the 2012 British television film of the same name with Tom Hiddleston), this version of the story — directed by David Michôd and written by Michôd and Joel Edgerton — hinged on the historically accurate details, including the kind of haircut a young king would actually sport in 1413. “We had to follow the rules of the period [and] make this extreme haircut,” Bertolazzi tells Refinery29. “If we didn’t, we’d lose the idea of the period.”

Turns out, most people living in the 15th century weren’t too concerned with beauty in the way we are today, Bertolazzi explains. Any drastic haircuts were most likely inspired by male members of the Church, like priests or monks. Many of them sported a partially-shaved head as a sign of religious humility, in a practice called tonsure — including Henry V, who wore his hair cropped in a ring shape around his head and cut just above his ears.

Bertolazzi knew that he couldn’t pitch the radical haircut right off the bat because, well, this is Timothée Chalamet, the Hollywood pretty boy known for his luscious curls. “I couldn’t say, ‘OK, we’re going to cut Timothée [with his] lovely curly hair, like a beautiful super sex symbol, like a monk,'” he says.

As Bertolazzi had anticipated, Chalamet was nervous about the dramatic transformation, which he admitted to Variety’s Marc Malkin at Tuesday’s red-carpet premiere of the film. “Even Timothée was worried,” Bertolazzi recalls. “He was terrified. It was really scary. But he was perfect for the character — [the cut] was perfect. He was different [after the haircut]. He become a king for real. It was cool.” (Bertolazzi notes that the divisive cut didn’t affect Chalamet’s cool-guy status IRL. He was still pretty cool.)

Don’t feel too bad for Chalamet: His hair clearly grew back fast enough for him to play Laurie in the Greta Gerwig-directed Little Women, a role that’s sure to have fans swooning over his wind-blown perfection for years to come.

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This story contains spoilers for Netflix’s The Politician.

As The Politician intro sequence makes clear, there are many parts that go into making Peyton (Ben Platt), all carefully curated by the student himself: Patriotic school pins in one compartment, prescription drugs in another. However, his actual success (although that term is debatable) in the St. Sebastian High School election and beyond is constructed almost entirely by the characters in his orbit. Alice (Julia Schlaepfer), McAfee (Laura Dreyfuss), James (Theo Germaine), Infinity (Zoey Deutch), Skye (Rahne Jones), and even nemesis Astrid (Lucy Boynton) individually inform, supplement, and challenge Peyton’s image creating the ideal candidate. It would not be wrong to say — and this is especially true by the end of season one — that Peyton doesn’t have what it takes by himself to make a convincing case for his presidency, yet we see his entire campaign team, as well as former enemies, abandon their adult lives to return to their down-and-out former candidate ahead of season two. Despite their arguably superior knowledge and perspectives, their political dreams rest solely on Peyton. 

They have stellar GPAs and are ruthlessly bloodthirsty, but the show’s creator Ryan Murphy never gives these six characters a chance to fully pursue their own political ambitions that you know they so desire  — so we did. 

This isn’t shade to Murphy, who knows full well that a story about 20 people running in the same election would be, well, a little too close to reality. The same way a horror movie wouldn’t be compelling if that character didn’t go in there, The Politician’s story is best served with one person as the flawed leader. The cast agrees, but they were still game to imagine their own character’s hypothetical political future when Refinery29 sat down with them in New York City. Schlaepfer, Dreyfuss, Germaine, Deutch, Jones, and Boynton all offered original slogans, and we did the rest.

Since there are reportedly four more seasons of The Politician ahead of us, this leaves ample room for a change in the narrative, and I firmly believe one of these supporting characters deserves your vote.

McAfee Westbrook, “Kill The Spare”

A vocal feminist, McAfee Westbrook is the leader St. Sebastian needs and will get whether they like it or not. There is literally no other reality that exists in which she doesn’t take the vote by a landslide. Hillary Clinton’s pantsuits have nothing on her vibrant ensembles, which is not the point of electing a female leader, but if it will convince you, then by all means follow that feeling all the way to the polls.

James Sullivan, “Stop Fucking Around”

Frankly, stopping to read this campaign description is already a waste of James’ time. Politics are about instinct, and James does not hesitate when it comes to making decisions. He’s not going to pander to voters or win you over with an emotional story. Instead, here are the cold hard facts: James is the one for this job, and if you don’t realise it then that’s actually sad for you.

Alice Charles, “Listen To Everything I Say”

Alice Charles is whatever woman you want her to be. She can be stoic, composed, and languid in her speech, or just a 17-year-old girl you want to look at puppies on Instagram with. It’s never certain which side you’re going to get, but both are effective in procuring the wants and needs for the students of St. Sebastian. She would literally leave her wedding for you.

Skye Leighton, “No Time For The Bullshit”

The choice is simple: You can be on the side of progress or against it. Skye Leighton would — will — be St. Sebastian’s first black, gender nonconforming president, and a voice like that is long overdue in the high school’s higher office. The rich, white, male president is a myth, and Skye’s candidacy is proof of progress.

Astrid Sloan, “Just: Astrid.”

Astrid Sloan does not want to be here, but somehow found herself in this race. She’s not going to fight for your vote, which makes her the most appealing candidate in a sea of aggressive wannabees. Also, her boyfriend died, remember? He moved an entire student body with a vulnerable speech at the debate? Feels weird for you to not honour his memory.

Infinity Jackson, “Macaroons For Everyone”

A vote for Infinity is a vote for freedom. Wouldn’t a world filled with sweet treats, amusement parks, and unlimited breadsticks be wonderful? What if that world was inside the halls of St. Sebastian? You know Infinity’s story. Now help her write a new chapter as your student body president.

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Allegations of misconduct by actor James Franco were made public in a lawsuit filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court Thursday, according to The New York Times.

Two former students at Franco’s bicoastal acting school Studio 4, Sarah Tither-Kaplan and Toni Gaal, filed a lawsuit against the actor, his business partner Vince Jolivette, the Rabbit Bandini production company, and it general manager Jay Davis alleging inappropriate behaviour.

Tither-Kaplan and Gaal claim that Franco used his power as a celebrity and instructor to take advantage of women who attended the now-defunct program, by encouraging them to participate in auditions and shoots that were sexually explicit in nature. The women allege they were denied protections such as nudity riders during scenes in which they were vulnerable, and felt pressured by Franco to participate in situations in which they were not comfortable. 

In order to participate in a training course on sex scenes, Franco allegedly had students audition for the class via videotape, and sign away their rights to the recordings. The lawsuit, which is seeking monetary compensation as well as class action status so other previous students can participate, seeks to ensure those sensitive tapes will be delivered back to the students or destroyed. 

Tither-Kaplan, who attended the sex scene course, claimed that Franco removed plastic guards around other students’ vaginas, and simulated performing oral sex on them. 

Tither-Kaplan previously spoke about this particular situation in a 2018 article with The Los Angeles Times, along with four other women who also shared negative experiences with Franco. Two students who spoke to The Los Angeles Times claimed Franco was “angry” when actresses on one of his shoots refused to be topless for a scene.

When Franco wore a Time’s Up pin on the red carpet at the Golden Globes in January of 2018, Tither-Kaplan told The Los Angeles Times it was a “slap in the face.” At the Women’s March later that month, actress Scarlett Johansson called out Franco by saying she wanted her “pin back” in the wake of the allegations. Some Oscar voters told The Los Angeles Times that they regretted voting for Franco for Best Actor for his film The Disaster Artist after reading of his allegations.

On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert shortly after the Los Angeles Times article broke, Franco insisted he was here to “here to listen and learn.”

Tither-Kaplan told The New York Times she has not spoken to Franco in two years, and that there “has been no action, publicly, that shows…these people know what they did is wrong and harmful and can’t been repeated.”

In October of 2018, Franco’s HBO series The Deuce announced it hired an intimacy coordinator after Deuce star Emily Meade approached executives about doing so in the wake of #MeToo allegations. 

Refinery29 reached out to Franco and Jolivette for comment.

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2019 hasn’t been my year. Parts of my life have crumbled and work that I’ve done on my mental and physical health has regressed. If you looked on my Instagram though, you’d have no idea. It’s all happy pictures from weddings and summer festivals, a staccato stream of career successes and one photo of a very large mozzarella cheese. 

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Yeehaws all round

A post shared by Kate Lloyd (@katelloud) on Aug 5, 2019 at 1:43pm PDT

There’s nothing new about what I’m describing; if anything, it’s been said before. A thousand times. We know that social media is not a reflection of reality. There have been conversations about it from the moment people worked out how to use filters to do more than just make things sepia-toned. 

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My muses

A post shared by Kate Lloyd (@katelloud) on Jun 26, 2019 at 12:20pm PDT

In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll tell you now that I even played with the brightness on that mozzarella photo. 

Since we were teenagers, millennials have been living in a world where it’s cool to project a much more exciting life than the ones we’re actually living. From carefully curating our MySpace pages to deciding which snaps were Facebook profile picture material and selecting our hottest photos for dating apps, designing versions of our lives for different parts of the internet has become second nature for us.

Recently though, there has been a backlash. In the past couple of weeks there has been a sharp focus on the difference between online personas and IRL personhood. Instagram scammer Caroline Calloway’s former friend/ghost writer revealed how they crafted her online presence. Meanwhile, Tavi Gevinson dug into the negative impact of living her “life as a brand” on Instagram. 

‘Authenticity’ has become a buzzword. In psychology, it’s a well established concept. For existentialists it measured the degree to which a person’s actions reflected their beliefs and desires, regardless of external pressures. Today, it’s used to describe everything from being open about your mental health struggles to posting a no-makeup selfie – and it has become social currency. 

Scroll through Instagram for long enough and you’ll see this shift in the types of things being posted. Influencers’ perfect holiday shots and Facetuned selfies have been replaced with a new wave of less polished photo tropes. Bikini photos are unfiltered and posted alongside captions about celebrating cellulite or stomach rolls. Romantic sunset shots are accompanied by long messages about how the Instagrammer was really feeling at that moment. And it’s starting to trickle down to those of us who don’t have thousands of followers, too. 

The move away from crafting an ideal online life makes sense. Research from 2016 showed that only 32% of people said they were always honest online. Other studies and articles have demonstrated that the perfect lives we pretend to have on social media are linked to growth in teenage depression, self-esteem issues, the loneliness epidemic and demand for plastic surgery. 

It’s clearly important that the stories told and pictures shared on social media include the bad as well as the good. But has the authenticity movement got a more uncomfortable side? By social media’s nature – the very fact that it is performative – can you ever be truly authentic on there? Does aiming for authenticity just create new pressures?

Psychologist Cortney S. Warren is an expert in honesty and self-deception. She says the advent of social media has been a journey of self-exploration for us all: “It’s the first generation that was raised with the internet. They’ve had a platform to explore themselves in a more public way than has been the case, to present yourself in ways that are honest and in ways that aren’t.” 

One person who has watched this happen is Lucy Loveridge, global head of talent at Gleam Futures, a digital-first talent agency that represents big names ranging from lifestyle and beauty vlogger Tanya Burr to cleaning influencer Mrs Hinch. 

“Creators on social media originally became successful because the audience found someone they could relate to,” she says. “There was a period of time between then and now where creators started to professionalise and improve the quality of their content. In some cases it has gone too far and certain creators have lost their authenticity. We’re now seeing a resurgence of the raw sharing of real life and a higher engagement with this. It’s how you can really get to know someone.” 

Feelings are something that many of us haven’t shared online since we had a LiveJournal. Now, though, it seems there’s a moral pressure – an imperative even – to reveal bits of yourself that you previously kept IRL only. 

For me, that’s terrifying. I’d rather acquaintances only know blurry details about my existence, keeping the firm outline of who I am for my closest friends. I’m bad at talking about my feelings with my mum, let alone with strangers. The bad news for me is that right now, spilling your honest feelings is the best way to go. 

Dating apps Hinge and Badoo report that the most honest and sincere user profiles do the best. Daters want to get an instant idea of who you really are and what makes you unique. Badoo designed the app in a way that they hope encourages people to be their real selves. “When we looked at dating language we saw a false level of perfection and aspiration,” says Natasha Briefel, Badoo’s UK marketing director. “It creates self-doubt, and dating app mechanisms fuel that even more, swiping and imagery rather than having full information about people.” 

On Instagram, influencers say the impact of opening up can be massive. For up-and-coming model and filmmaker Florence Kosky, being authentic online has helped her get an important message across and make proper connections. Having lost friends to suicide, the 23-year-old, who is signed to Models 1, posts honest stories about that reality for her 10,000 followers. “Modelling gives you a platform. If I care about stuff it’s silly not to use it for those things,” she says. “Going through that, experiencing what happens when people don’t talk about their feelings, you can see the really negative effects.”

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tanned but still a tit

A post shared by Florence Kosky (@floskyyx) on Aug 10, 2019 at 7:09am PDT

Kosky is a strong advocate for being true to yourself online. “There’s no point trying to be something you’re not ever,” she says. “Things you care about, your sense of humour or what you actually [look like] rather than the Facetuned version of yourself… I think you might as well represent yourself as yourself. Otherwise you’re going to end up more miserable.”

That said, it’s not all good. Being authentic on social media can be tricky as we’re all changing all the time. “You might think you know yourself very well,” says psychologist Michelle Drouin, a relationship and technology expert. “And then that could change. You might look back at things you’ve posted years back and think, OMG that’s not me.” As we age we experience more things, and our beliefs and desires change; what is authentic to us now might not be authentic to us in a few years. 

Additionally, even those people who claim to be authentic might not be. Because there is now a public desire for openness, it means that – as Gevinson discusses in her essay – it’s being commodified. 

If the internet is a shopfront where we get work, get dates and get famous, then right now it’s authenticity that sells. Demi Lovato’s recent Instagram post about her cellulite got more likes than any of her previous ones. Former Love Island contestant Malin Andersson is building an entire career off revealing her true feelings about her body. And that’s great, if it’s coming from a real place. However the pivot to openness that’s happening on some high profile channels is more like a change in aesthetic than a change in moral integrity. There’s a new wave of up-and-coming influencers who are rejecting the Instagram aesthetic for something that feels more ‘raw’ because it earns them likes, followers and, therefore, money. 

Kosky has noticed that some of her peers are joining in with the movement to be more authentic in a way that she believes is less about being true to themselves and more about projecting a different kind of ‘perfect’, one that’s socially acceptable. 

“There’s a pressure to be really hot,” she says. “But also to be an activist and to be living clean. It’s still curated and everyone still cares about having followers and likes. I’ve seen a couple of videos of people filming themselves, obviously just wanting to take a selfie video, but they’ll be talking to camera like, ‘Click the link in my bio’ [to some activist cause]. It’s a weird thing because it makes authenticity less authentic.” 

We have to ask ourselves whether anything posted for other people to see can ever be truly ‘authentic’. Consider when Facebook launched and suddenly it was cool to post 80 photos of you hammered on a night out, rather than eight pretentious MySpace pictures. We were still curating a version of ourselves, just a slightly different one.  

Drouin agrees that it’s almost impossible not to show a curated version of your life on social media. “In my friend group the people who post nothing are probably people who have a lot of things to brag about,” she says. “So then in order to post something that makes them seem like the rest of us they’ll post something very normal, like ‘Here I am in the grocery line’. They’re not lying but instead of bragging about the beautiful lives they lead, they’re trying to say they’re just like everyone else.”

It makes sense that you’d want to hold back from posting things that people might find annoying – especially at a time when ‘realness’ is trending – and instead post things that people engage with more positively or that will help you connect with followers better. Even Gevinson has admitted to having a third, private Instagram account that only she had access to and used to post huge brags about how she was living that she’d never share publicly. 

Kosky is so aware of the impact of faux-authenticity on models and influencers with platforms that it’s made her think carefully about the kinds of things she posts on her channel. She tells me that earlier this year a mental health charity asked her to post a photo and caption about body image for a campaign they were running. It was a message she was keen to support – “Obviously I’ve got insecurities and there are parts of my body that I don’t like” – but she was also worried about feeding into what she feels is a wave of faux-authentic posts riding on the back of the body positivity movement. 

“I was like, ‘Oh my god what picture am I going to post?'” she says. “A girl who is in the skinnier side of the population and model taking a picture in my underwear being like, ‘It’s so brave of me to post this’. If you’ve got 13-year-old girls following you then that can be equally bad for them to see. I just took a stupid selfie instead to write about.”

Not everyone is approaching the new zeitgeist so critically, though. And as the prizes for presenting an ‘authentic’ version of ourselves on social media increase, we have to examine our motivation. 

Warren says that in order to do this, we need to consider our goals. “Deliberately trying to post images that you find hard sharing can be really healthy,” she says. “Vulnerability makes you closer to other people. But it can also be unhealthy if you’re not really sure about what you’re doing and why. It can be shame-provoking, manipulative or attention-seeking.”

She adds that if you’re a private person, it’s just as authentic to keep the hard stuff offline as it is for a very open person to reveal all their secrets online. The key thing is to be authentic with yourself. “I fundamentally believe that the goal is to be honest with yourself all the time,” she says. “The more you are with yourself, the better. It gives you the power to live the life you want to live.”

As someone who often races through life without thinking, this is advice I’m going to take on board. In a society that still favours success and attractiveness above all else, it’s much higher risk for a normal person to open up about their uglier or less successful side online than it is for someone with the support that comes with being rich, famous or powerful. If your post goes down badly, there’s no PR to pick up the pieces. 

If you are that brave then I’m in awe of you, but I feel fine with accepting that I am not. As women we’re pigeonholed by others all the time: as fragile, as bossy, as homemakers or sexual objects. To be honest, it’s nice to have an outlet where I pigeonhole myself. So when I do consider why I post only positive things on my social media channels, it’s largely because they make me happy: a joyful picture of my friends, some work I’m proud of, a thirst trap I posted for a dopamine rush when I was brutally hungover. I want my Instagram to be an antidote to my life rather than a place to work on my problems. And that’s fine with me – I’m dealing with them elsewhere. 

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It’s 10am and I’m sitting in a consultation room at a famous Harley Street clinic. A doctor is peering earnestly at my face. “The problem we have here,” he says, holding up a mirror so that I can inspect said ‘problem’, “is the gap between your nose and lips. It’s too long. You’ll need a lip lift. And the shape around your chin and jaw is not symmetrical. You could try a lower face reshape.”

Horrified, I find myself agreeing with him and leave the clinic feeling like a total failure. The ridiculous thing? I’d only gone in for microdermabrasion. Back home I check the ‘flaws’ and wonder how many people that day he’d told they needed ‘work’.

Research reports that in 2019, the cosmetic aesthetic industry is worth £2 billion globally, with that figure set to rise over the coming years. Never has the perfectly symmetrical ‘golden ratio face’ been more popular among individuals in the UK and with the endless scroll of flawless Instagram selfies, it’s difficult to tell what’s real, cosmetic or just a little bit of Facetune.

While there might not be an end to the quest for perfection any time soon, are clinics playing on women’s insecurities and contributing to the rise of cosmetic aesthetic procedures? My own experience tells me yes. In the name of honest journalism, I decided to test the ‘peddle-o-meter’ by visiting another clinic, just off fancy Wimpole Street, where countless big name aesthetic clinicians take up residency. It’s full of glossy magazines and thousands of pounds worth of plush decor.

“I’m thinking of getting a chemical peel,” I say. The doctor gives me a good once-over. “Yes, we can do that,” she replies, then out of nowhere: “We could also administer some filler to restore your cheeks too.” Wildly, I find myself agreeing – again. As the aesthetician shows me a 2ml syringe, she almost looks poised to inject me right there and then, but I tell her I need to think about it and promptly leave.

Talking to friends and colleagues proves that I’m not alone in my encounters with pushy aestheticians, especially when it comes to having my insecurities exploited for money. Amelia, 29, had a similar experience. “I went to a clinic as they were offering free 15-minute facials,” she told me. “During my consultation they said my skin was 90% damaged and I needed a HIFU laser (a non-invasive face lift). I said I wasn’t sure but they persuaded me to wait in the reception area. When I said I couldn’t afford it (it was over £2,000) they tried to convince me to start a payment plan. It left me feeling insecure about my skin.”

Personally, I’m no stranger to a bit of ‘work’. I’ve dabbled in Baby Botox and liked that it gave my face a subtle refresh. But is being told you need cosmetic enhancements ethical? Mr Naveen Cavale, consultant plastic and reconstructive surgeon and clinical director at King’s College Hospital, thinks not.

“Up-selling should never ever happen in the aesthetics industry,” he told me. “This is not like casually buying a television. It is a major change to your face or body with potentially lifelong consequences. What’s more, pointing out other flaws is a form of bullying and anyone who does this should be reported.” Mr Cavale’s advice is especially poignant when you consider that one in 20 girls aged 17 to 19 were found to have a body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), according to the NHS’ Mental Health of Children and Young People survey. In the UK there is no legal age restriction on aesthetic treatments like Botox, meaning even teenagers can step into clinics nationwide.

Jackie, 26, from London, experienced the emotional consequences of up-selling when she had nose surgery aged 22. “I had been unhappy with my nose for many years,” she told me. “During the consultation, at a reputable Harley Street clinic with glowing magazine reviews, I was told that I’d need a very expensive chemical peel to go with the £5k procedure. The surgeon said that this would get rid of the ‘orange peel’ look of my nose, which I now know is entirely normal. We all have pores! That said, this gave me a further complex. It’s only now that I realise the surgeon was trying to up-sell me treatment to make more money. This should have made me question the surgeon’s authenticity but I was impressionable and believed I needed these add-ons to look and feel good.”

Dr Anjali Mahto, a consultant dermatologist, has heard similar stories from patients who have visited other clinics and been advised on a menu of injectable treatments they really didn’t need. She believes this leaves them feeling confused, vulnerable and inadequate. “When booking treatments, don’t be temped by ‘cut-price’ deals and discounts,” she says. “A reputable clinic should not be doing this. You should not be pressurised into having any treatments on the same day and a proper consultation should always take place first to make you fully aware of the results.”

But it can be hard to say no, as Sarah, 26, experienced when purchasing lip filler in an online promotion. “I should have questioned the price as it was an absolute bargain,” she told me. “I was attracted by the W1 postcode but on arrival it all went downhill. The doctor said my lips were too thin and I would need more than I had purchased. I immediately handed over an extra £150. Within a week there was literally nothing left in my lips. I still don’t know what he used. I had waited four years to pluck up the courage to meet with an expert and my experience was ruined. Now I hate my lips even more.”

Psychologist Sara Rourke of Soho Psychotherapy believes this kind of up-selling can be damaging for women’s mental health but is also the linchpin of some cosmetic clinics’ sales strategy. “In uncertain and vulnerable positions, we seek authority figures to contain our anxieties,” she says. “They are deemed ‘safe’ and given immediate trust due to their position. Too often, however, these industries are implicitly promoting their services and the financial success of the business is placed over people’s physical and emotional wellbeing.”

A good place to start is to find the right practitioner. There are a handful of informative sites such as RealSelf and SaveFace, which show authentic reviews of clinics with real pictures (some slightly graphic), as well as the British Association of Dermatologists (BAD).

Dr Rita Rakus, who has a cosmetic aesthetics practice in Knightsbridge, always urges women who want aesthetic procedures to find a reputable practice by spending time researching a range of cosmetic doctors. “Firstly, you should make sure they are certified and a member of a professional organisation such as the General Medical Council,” Rita says. “Also the doctor should put a treatment plan together that is individual to a person and make a qualified judgement as to whether the patient is getting the treatment done for the right reasons.”

It’s important to recognise that people book in for aesthetic enhancements every day for completely different reasons, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this individual choice. But being explicitly told you need work can leave people feeling insecure, insulted and vulnerable.

Ultimately, real change lies in the hands of the government and the establishment of a model to regulate the industry. But this is a call for clinics everywhere, whether offering cosmetics surgery such as a nose job or an aesthetic treatment like Botox, to consider the implications of their practices on women. No one should ever be pushed into a decision, especially something as life-changing and potentially risky as an aesthetic procedure.

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Ever snap an Instagram selfie (maybe a NSFW drunk one) and intend to share it with just your Close Friends… except your thumb slips and before you know it, it’s been viewed by all 417 of your followers (including that one aunt you muted)? Well now, Instagram is launching a whole new photo messaging app called Threads — and it makes sharing photos with your Close Friends (and your Close Friends only) a whole lot easier.

Here’s how it works: If you have a Close Friends list on Instagram, it will carry over to Threads (and if you don’t already, you can make one on Threads directly). The app, which you can download in the App Store and which lives separately from Instagram, opens directly to the camera for easy photo access. But what makes it even easier to use than Instagram is that alongside the shutter button on the bottom of the camera interface are profile pictures of the accounts you interact with most. Instead of clicking the shutter, you can simply select the photo of your intended recipient and send to them with two taps only — making for a faster-than-ever photo-messaging experience. And you can also customise which profile pictures appear at the bottom of your camera screen.

And, if you want to send photos or videos to multiple recipients, you can just click on the shutter button you’re already used to, which will bring you to your Close Friends list to choose from. The camera also has built-in shortcuts that Instagram doesn’t — you can swipe up to send and pull down to delete, so you can capture that weird guy on the subway even more inconspicuously than you did on Instagram.

There’s also a pretty standard messaging inbox, which lives both on Threads and on Instagram, where you can communicate with your Close Friends only. But what makes Threads especially different from Instagram is its new status feature. It basically works like Slack — you can choose from preset statuses (like “At Home” or “On The Move”) or make your own, and that status will appear next to your name where it appears in Direct Messages for your Close Friends to see. Or you can opt into Auto Status, which sets your status for you automatically based on your location, motion, and phone information (though it will never share your coordinates). Because if Stories weren’t enough, now there’s an even more involved way to document to everyone what you’re doing at all times.

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While Billie Eilish is all about the emotional songs, she’s not keen on speaking publicly about her love life (the 17-year-old would much rather share her love of The Office). However, she did recount one of her early date stories with Howard Stern on Monday, and it’s even worse than you’d expect a 13-year-old girl’s date to be.

While the singer didn’t name names, she said the boy was “super rich” and took her to the movies — with his butler.

“He kissed me, and then he said, ‘That was not as magical as I thought it was gonna be,'” she remembered, which is not the type of “Bad Guy” she meant in her song. Rather than acknowledge the fact that no kiss is magical when you’re 13, the boy apparently left the movie theatre without even saying goodbye.

“He was super-rich, and his butler – literally, his butler – his butler was there the entire time, but in a different movie theatre,” she explained, adding, “I was stuck there. No one told me that they were gonna leave.”

To make matters worse? “I went home and cried, and then the next day it was Valentine’s Day.”

But Eilish got the last laugh. With the support of an overwhelming number of fans, she released her first album earlier this year. This past weekend, she performed on Saturday Night Live. And, if that doesn’t sound like justice, know this: Apparently, “Dude is hella ugly now.”

In the words of Stern: “Good!”

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I’m sat in the back of a taxi with a friend*, both of us in full drag, necks craned at a 45 degree angle because our wigs are too tall for the car roof. We always travel in Ubers when we’re in drag – every drag performer I know does, when they can afford it; when we can’t, we drag all our drag to the club and put it on there. It’s just not safe to get on public transport in drag.

“We’re about to enter a new era of drag in the UK.” Now that sounds promising – like perhaps the arrival of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK means that this conversation I’m having with my friend in this Uber could happen on public transport, because with increased visibility you might assume that the world might get safer for people like me and mine. But that’s not necessarily true.

Both our voices warble with worry, for various reasons. The announcement of RuPaul UK sent worry-waves through the drag community a year ago, and the worry has only heightened as the air date has edged closer. But what is this worry about?

For the average British Drag Race fan – of which there are, literally, millions – this news is awesome. Finally some queens of our own who’ll come down the local gay bar in Lancaster for a night. That is exciting: the fact that people who aren’t necessarily exposed to drag will witness it on their TV screens, via the BBC no less. “Undoubtedly, this will change a few minds,” another drag friend of mine, who lives in Blackpool, tells me. “I for one am excited, although I don’t know how well a polished American competition format can represent the real heart of UK drag, which to me is dirty, cheeky, unpolished.”

Changing minds is one thing, certainly, and we all know exposure drives understanding. But my friend, who we’ll call Mary, is on the money when it comes to her worries about true UK drag representation. Firstly, the heart of UK drag is not about polish. It’s about entertainment but also about challenging the system around us, whether via punk politics or impressive gender subversion. We occupy basements and bars, and having watched episode one of the show, it feels like this heart isn’t quite captured.

“The show is real white, right?” another friend, who also wishes not to be named, tells me. “I mean, the most talented, most special drag performers I know come from my community, the QTIPOC+ community, and it’s both disappointing and unsurprising to see so many white faces on this very stereotypically British themed show. It’s also, obviously, a cast full of cis male drag queens which, frankly, is both boring and utterly unrepresentative of where the best drag in Britain exists: among kings, in-betweens, gender fuckers, aliens – that’s drag’s future. This is the same again.”

These are points that are felt widely across the drag community, and people – like the brilliant Chiyo – are staging anti-Drag Race parties and performances which will platform and prioritise bodies and styles of drag not allowed on the show. This is British drag as it should be: radical, diverse, non-competitive, punk.

Another worry we’re feeling in the drag community is about the changing economy of our work.

Over the past seven or eight years, the unstable economy of drag has slowly been able to level out somewhat. This is undoubtedly because of a confluence of the presence of RuPaul’s Drag Race and increased LGBTQIA+ media representation – so now we get booked, we write books, we read them to kids and get BBC podcasts; we host brunches and dance at Pride, and we take all this work to feed ourselves, pay our rent and allow us to make the radical work which most people won’t see, which is by queers, for queers. This is a rough sketch of what the drag economy looks like, at least in London. But that’s most probably about to change.

“The Drag Race queens out here get $5000 an appearance, and people like me often get $100 or less, and then tips – if people are feeling generous, that is,” a friend of mine who is very active on the Brooklyn scene explained over email. That’s a terrifying prospect in many ways – that a budget that would usually be shared over five performers’ fees might be swallowed into one girl from Drag Race’s pocket. That’s not her fault of course, but intensifying the capitalist framework through which drag will most probably now have to exist can only mean loss of earnings for those who have just about struck a balance. For those who get booked less – which is often the case for the bodies we don’t see on the show – this could pose a real problem.

My friends are more driven than ever to make, and take up, more space. Of course I might be wrong about our small slice of the economy, but it feels like we’re about to plunge into a new era of British drag – and that’s a little scary.

I do hope I’m wrong, of course. I hope our delicate drag ecosystem isn’t too damaged by the arrival of this new drag behemoth. And if you’re reading this and wondering how to help beyond the show – the key is to support your local drag nights. Remember we exist and work hard off-screen. Go to the bars and the scenes where we exist off the box, and witness Britain’s real drag superstars in action.

*All of the drag performers who contributed to this piece wish to remain anonymous.

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