Kate’s £3,000 helicopter trip on taxpayer... as Queen goes on £54 train
She can’t leave them alone! But critics say the results are unflattering — and ageing
LOOKING chic in a grey coat flecked with sequins, the Queen arrived in London yesterday after her extended Christmas break in Norfolk on a scheduled train service.
The cost of her first class ticket? £54.90 for a journey of one hour and 40 minutes.
Quite a contrast, then, to the Duchess of Cambridge who made the same journey by helicopter on Sunday with a return cost to the taxpayer of around £3,000.
While the two trips aren’t entirely comparable – not least because Kate made the journey to and from Anmer Hall, the mansion she shares with Prince William on the Queen’s Sandringham estate, on the same day – the difference between their modes of transport is certainly notable.
On Sunday Kate, 34, was attending a service in London to mark the 75th anniversary of the Air Training Corps, her first engagement as its Honorary Air Commandant.
It is understood she took the Queen’s Flight, the helicopter used by royals on official engagements. It is paid for from money given to the Queen by the Government to fund her official duties as head of state.
It landed at Kensington Palace, Kate’s London residence, allowing her time to change before heading to the engagement for 11am. The 110-mile flight would take around 45 minutes. The helicopter was seen taking off again after the service concluded.
In contrast, the 89-year-old Queen took the 10.54am train yesterday from King’s Lynn station – the nearest to Sandringham – to Kings Cross.
Labour MP John Mann, a member of the Treasury Select Committee, said: ‘The younger royals need to follow Her Majesty’s example in saving money. Well done ma’am.’ Kensington Palace said: ‘ The Royal Household always seeks to travel in the most appropriate way possible considering the arrangements for an official engagement.’ What has Kate done to her brows?
MANY of the world’s most beautiful women have had one thing — or rather two — in common: elegant eyebrows. Audrey Hepburn’s bushy brows perfectly framed her doe-eyes, while Marilyn Monroe’s playful, angular arches complemented her coquettish persona, and Elizabeth Taylor’s dark eyebrows became her trademark feature.
A pair of beautifully shaped eyebrows can make the eyes look bigger, help to even out any asymmetry in our features and even make us look years younger.
Little wonder, then that British women spend an astonishing £2.3 billion a year perfecting theirs, with a third of us taking to the tweezers every day to keep them groomed.
As the brows naturally thin with age, filling them in with powders, pencils and shadows is often touted as a quick and easy way to hold back the years. But, as pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge sporting thick, dark, waxy-looking brows this week prove, over filled-in eyebrows can have the opposite effect — emphasising crow’s feet and under- eye shadows and making the skin around the eyes look hollow and saggy.
Her eyebrows were noticeably darker and bushier than when she was last pictured in December, and they appeared to have been worked on with a black eyebrow pencil — her right more vigorously than her left.
As a 34-year-old busy mother of two small children, it is no surprise that the Duchess has resorted to the make-up bag in an attempt to look more youthful. Kate doesn’t have a make-up artist and so grooms her brows herself — but her latest look has met with mixed reactions.
‘Painted eyebrows don’t look good on anyone,’ wrote one commentator online. ‘One is clearly thicker than the other.’ ‘She just looks old,’ added another. ‘It’s overdone. She looks far younger with a thinner brow.’
Kate’s eyebrows are certainly very different to the natural arches she sported when she first began dating William in 2003.
She is said to have been so concerned about having thin, patchy eyebrows that in 2012 she started using a £15.50 brown powder from Peter Jones (by make-up artist Bobbi Brown) to fill them out and emphasise her green eyes. Victoria Smith, director of aesthetics at Absolute Aesthetics clinic in London, says being too heavy-handed with eyebrows can completely change the shape of a face.
‘The trick is to replicate the wispiness of natural hair growth — not make it look like two slugs have crawled on to your face,’ she explains. ‘Eyebrows that are too heavy or too thick can emphasise the bags under your eyes and the wrinkles. You’re trying to open out your eyes, not close them down.
‘Very dark eyebrows make them look tired and hooded, and your skin appear to droop.’
Experts say all good brows begin with the arch. Women naturally have more arched eyebrows than men, thought to be due to our faces being slimmer and more elongated.
‘Perfect arches have a fantastic lifting effect,’ explains Shavata Singh, Britain’s leading eyebrow expert, whose celebrity clients include model Elle Macpherson and singer Natalie Imbruglia. ‘A beautiful shape,
balanced brows and defined arch can make the eyes pop.’
Getting the shape right is more about geometry than beauty, however. Senior beautician Jaimineey Patel, at London’s Blink Brow Bar, swears by a three-step method.
‘First, you hold a pencil lengthways at the corner of the nose — the straight part, not the nostril. This is where the inside edge of the eyebrow should be. Then, hold the pencil outwards diagonally from the same spot and line it up with the outside of your eye. This is the outside edge. Finally, hold it in line with the pupil of your eye to pinpoint the arch.’
Eyebrows that are too long can look wispy and untidy, while if they’re too short they can appear out of proportion to the rest of your face. This means your cheekbones lose definition and your nose will look wider than it is.
‘Eyebrows aren’t symmetrical — we say they’re sisters, not twins,’ adds Jaimineey. ‘There will be natural variation between the two, but this is in sync with the rest of your face, so you’re not looking for an exact mirror image.’
Kate was right, then, not to make her brows look exactly the same, but has perhaps exaggerated the difference a little too much.
Eyebrow thickness — the next stage — tends to be heavily influenced by changing fashions. In the Eighties, for example, actress Brooke Shields sparked a trend for unkempt, bulky brows, while Madonna’s Nineties look tended towards a thinner, less prominent style.
While Cara Delevingne and Keira Knightley have sparked a recent rise in statement brows, the trend has mercifully rowed back from the ‘Scouse brow’ — an unnatural-looking, thick, square shape popular in Liverpool — which has been replaced by a narrower, more subtle look.
There are all sorts of painful-sounding salon techniques to give you perfect brows — from waxing and threading (a procedure originating in Asia, in which a thin cotton thread is twisted tightly around hair follicles to remove them) to eyebrow tattoos and permanent make-up costing more than £700 a go.
Meanwhile, High Street chemists have seen a 300 per cent boom in eyebrow products, and brow bars have sprung up in department stores.
Whatever shape you opt for, Shavata warns against over-plucking. ‘Hair doesn’t always grow back and you risk permanently losing your most flattering shape,’ she says.
The final decision is a cosmetic one — which colour of eyebrow gel, pencil or shadow to use to enhance your natural shape?
Natalie Plain, founder of the Billion Dollar Brows cosmetics brand, says picking the right shade ‘softens any facial shape and provides a natural fullness to the face’.
The hue should be one shade lighter than your hair colour, she adds, except in the case of very blonde hair — which works best with one shade darker. Kate, she says, has chosen a colour that overshadows her pale skin and light brunette hair. Her face looks noticeably thinner, too, because the dark pencil makes her skin look pinched and drawn.
‘She’s used way too much brow make-up without blending,’ Natalie explains. ‘She has such fine delicate features and her brows should complement those — not be distracting.’
But this isn’t the first time Kate’s eyebrows have drawn attention away from the rest of her face.
Over the years, they’ve changed beyond all recognition — and not always for the better. With some help from the experts, we trace the Duchess’s eyebrow evolution . . .