MILLENNIAL DIARY

LAST week saw famous husband Jay-Z confirm his long-suspected infidelity to demigoddess Beyonce. Like all male celebrities caught with their pants down, he couldn’t just admit he’s a ratbag. His confession, in an interview, was laced with the kind of pseudo-psychological nonsense talk we’ve come to expect. It’s like Harvey ‘seeking treatment’ Weinstein has started producing men’s apologies.

“You have to survive,” said Jay, right, speaking of his difficult childhood. “So you go into survival mode, and when you go into survival mode, what happens? You shut down all emotions. So, even with women, you gonna shut down emotionally, so you can’t connect... In my case, like, it’s deep. And then all the things happen from there: infidelity.”

I’ve reread it a few times now and I’m not certain it isn’t simply the result of a random-word generator; I’m not sure if there is actually an apology or even an excuse in there.

Still, I couldn’t believe how forthcoming he was being about cheating on the world’s favourite woman — until he mentioned their yet to be released joint album, which Jay described as functioning “almost like a therapy session”. And there it is. Even they, for whom the term ‘power couple’ was invented, feel the need to air their dirty laundry for publicity. Or worse, they might believe (as we do) that the public has a right to the grubby details of their relationship.

Beyonce blessed us with her album Lemonade last year. Its themes of empowerment, anger, revenge and the mysterious ‘Becky with the good hair’, led to much speculation about whether it was autobiographical. ‘You fools’, we said loftily, ‘don’t you know that art can be just that — nothing more and nothing less? Go back to Taylor Swift, you uncultured swine’. Bey herself neither confirmed nor denied — as is her divine right. We thought she was adopting a persona, like Bowie, to make an incredible album.

But she wasn’t; Jay-Z is a scoundrel. David Bowie is dead.

So now we have Beyonce and Jay’s joint album about their marital troubles to look forward to. It will be like sitting at the dinner table of a passive-aggressive, quietly livid couple.

Now we know Lemonade was Bey’s way of telling us why she didn’t leave Jay. I feel kind of guilty that she needed to do that. The internet thinks Beyonce is its girlfriend/spiritual leader and entitled to her life and decisions. It’s grim.

While this is true, it is also true that after seeing the pictures of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds gadding about Powerscourt in Wicklow last week, I spent a full half-hour trying to find photographs of their wedding on the internet. Five years after the big day and there’ are only a handful of pictures from the day, most of them of food. I felt personally victimised by the fact I couldn’t see every detail and angle of the wedding dress in the one fuzzy photo of Blake and her bridesmaids I found online. Celebrity oversharing may be depressing, but my god, it’s better than the alternative. Let’s be having that joint album.

SO it turns out our glittery placards demanding that the world be saved have actually been killing it. Experts have proposed banning glitter because it’s made up of microplastics, which cause irreversible damage to marine life. Fish have been eating our sequins and now plastics can be found in one-third of the fish we eat.

This revelation and threat of sparkleannihilation has obviously sent 20-somethings into a meltdown. On one hand, we’re all ethical vegans drinking fair-trade coffee with local honey; on the other, we are obsessed with glitter.

Glitter and unicorns and mermaids have proved to be as gruesomely relentless as sexual assault. Everywhere you look there are unicorn make-up brushes, shimmering unicorn toast, glitter-laced gin (called ‘Unicorn tears’ obv) and pyjamas, T-shirts, bikinis and teacups emblazoned with logic-defying, glittery all-caps: ‘UNICORNS ARE AWESOME. I AM AWESOME. THEREFORE I AM A UNICORN.’

The stuff was compulsory at this summer’s festivals, with thousands of gurning kids in bondage gear dipped in it. Every millennial’s favourite make-up brand, Glossier, is admired for its pared-back, easy-breezy natural approach to beauty — but its cult best-seller is a glittery lip balm.

It represents so much of what we stand for as a generation; the good, the bad and the criminally ugly. It’s fun and silly and childish; we don’t want to, nay can’t, grow up. Adulting is hard, glitter is easy! It’s obviously super gay, and we’re all about that RuPaul gender-bending, sexuallyfluid life. A glitter-ravaged face says, ‘I voted Yes in the referendum!’.

And just like us, glitter doesn’t know when to stop; anyone who has a child or gone to a pride march will know the stuff keeps showing up for months; it’s actually solved murder investigations for this very reason. Fun!

Women well into their 30s are embracing this pastel-tinted, glitter-soaked pre-teen aesthetic. In a world of Trump and Brexit and MeToo and shootings and racism and Christmas elections and Jay-Z cheating on Beyonce, we might need a bit of light and sparkle. But we also need to pull our heads out of our glittery arses and engage with the bad stuff. Don’t dip a turd in sequins and call it a lollipop — everything is still terrible.

I say bring on the ban. Throw out your T-shirt saying ‘I’m secretly a unicorn’. You’re not, you’re a 28-year-old under-employed woman-baby. Screwing the planet notwithstanding, I’m sick of this kind of wilful self-infantilisation. Obviously, I would fully support some kind of wartime style rationing system so drag queens can still access it. The rest of us, however, deserve to have the sparkle we wash off our faces sold back to us in polluted, glitterstuffed salmon. A ‘unicorn fish’ trend could be the Darwinian solution we need to eliminate everyone’s least favourite generation.

I’m saying goodbye to glitter, and good riddance. Maybe banning it will force us all to grow up. It’s about time.