Contouring? That’ll put colour in your cheeks!

Away from the TV studios, Sandi loves to abandon the make-up and go for the natural look. So she’s puzzled by the latest trends in grooming...

People have been using make-up since… well, since there were people. Check out a 3,300-yearold bust of that cracking Egyptian queen, Nefertiti, and I guarantee the first thing you’ll notice is her eyeliner. Even today people can’t mention Cleopatra without sighing over how red her lips were.

Make-up can be marvellous. It can enhance, conceal and give confidence, so I feel bad that it’s never really been my thing. Of course, I’m lucky in that my work always comes with a wonderful make-up artist. On The Great British Bake Off I work with Debbie, and I love her. She is an expert. There is nothing she doesn’t know about taming my tangled locks or preventing my nose from looking as though I’m about to lead reindeer into the night sky. I know lots of women who would love an hour in Debbie’s charge, but the truth is that she struggles with me.

I think I am her only artiste (as we say in show business) who has her make-up done while facing away from the mirror. I don’t like to look, I don’t ask any questions and my favourite bit of the day is in the evening, when she gently washes my face with a warm cloth to get rid of it. It’s fantastic that she can make me look awake at six o’clock in the morning in a freezing damp field, but all I actually care about is that she is really nice, hilariously rude to me and goes beyond her job description by providing black coffee.

I’ve never been interested in the world of beauty. I don’t know why. My wife (also called Debbie… It’s a theme that makes the transition from home to work easier) says I am the only person she knows who combs her hair without looking at it. I think I lack the patience and besides, it’s not as though I’ve got a face that begs to be stared at.

As a consequence, when I do catch up with the latest trends I am always startled. Did you know it is possible to have a lash lift? Seriously. It’s a sort of perm for your eyelashes. Apparently you lie down, shut your eyes, someone puts gunk (please insert your own technical term) on your lashes, then applies a heated rod to them before sealing the whole thing with more… gunk. A heated rod on your eyes! Didn’t they do that in the Spanish Inquisition? And it takes about 40 minutes. I could have made a cheesecake in that time.

So I was quite pleased to read recently that the new thing in beauty is the Natural Look. This, I thought, I can do. No sitting in a chair trying to be patient while someone reduces your eyebrows to a thin expression of permanent surprise. You can let it all go – as I’ve been doing for years. I was thrilled until I read on and discovered that the average woman trying to achieve this minimal effect spends 29 minutes per day doing so and uses 10 different products. Ten? I have about two. One is out of date and the other is soap. It turns out there are even women who get up early to put on their natural make-up so that their partner never sees them bare faced. I don’t bother with that. My partner wears glasses, which I just hide in the morning. No model or actress ever really sports the Natural Look. It’s all smoke and mirrors and make-up. Sadly, we live in a world where social media is so full of manipulated selfies it is spawning a generation of adolescents deluded into thinking everyone else is better looking than they are. And it’s not just women who are worrying. The weirdest make-up novelty that I read about is men who are – I don’t know how to put this politely – using make-up to contour their… appendages. I’m not really sure why or who would benefit. To be honest, I stopped reading – but it disturbed me for days. So let me be really clear. If you see me on TV, then it is someone else who has made me presentable. If you see me in the street on my day off, then you’re in for a shock. I work in the world of make believe and I love the skill of the make-up artists, but I do think genuinely natural faces are glorious. Where possible, I wish more of us could just accept who we are. There’s no such thing as perfection and that, in itself, is perfect.

I don’t have a face that begs to be stared at