French women are natural beauties — with some help.
The mystique takes effort to cultivate
Give a Frenchwoman lemons and she will start a cultural trend. When no less an authority than Madame Figaro magazine decided to explode the long-standing myth of the French woman as an effortless “natural beauty” — she who can eat bread and cheese and cupcakes yet retain her figure as well as her innate sex appeal — the news went gleefully round the planet.
No, argued Peggy Frey, a senior editor at the fashion magazine, we French women are not naturally slim, and our vaunted chic is faked.
The truth is that, yes, as a rule, we dress any old how.
Those alluring highlights in our hair come from a bottle. Far from having an exotic sex life and the lingerie to go with it, we own as many cotton undergarments as your average housewife. And Picard Surgeles, those heavenly supermarkets where you can buy yummy, ready-made frozen dinners, is our BFF.
If you expect us to be womanning the barricades, consider this: No one here in France is batting a dyed, collagen-fortified, delicately mascara-ed eyelash. We fake things? La belle affaire. You have to be a flawless, sixfoot, corn-bred teenage daughter of the Midwest to look effortlessly good. Is it unfair that more attractive people have a better life? Perhaps — but we just deal with it. To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, a French woman is not born, she is constructed.
So how do we do it? We French are drilled from infancy by our mothers on how to make the best of what we’ve got.
We feel we have an obligation to look nice, but we see it as simply doing ourselves justice.
Every French woman is a Kissinger-like realist. Unless we happen to have porcelain skin and the kind of legs that look coltish in a pair of hobnailed Dr. Martens, we leave the excesses of punk and goth to cutting-edge English fash- ionistas (so tiresome…).
Our aim is to showcase our best features with what we have: We never, ever forget the bigger picture. Every time we pick an outfit for the day, we ask ourselves one thing only: Does this help me?
Certainly, we know how to look thinner than our British and North American sisters. On stark national averages alone, we are in trimmer shape to start with.
Part of this is a way of life: Scratch the most sophisticated Parisian and you’ll find peasant roots.
We still have a relatively natural relationship with vegetables, even if we now buy them in ready-to-steam packets. We mix our own vinaigrette.
We can slave over a hot stove to prepare our mothers’ favourite recipes, even if we don’t have the time during the week.
As for diets, of course we follow them but we prefer to move those extra carbs discreetly around our plate in silence, rather than embark on a boring evangelical bout of public calorie-counting.
It may be, as Madame Figaro reports, that we spend just a fifth of what American women spend on lingerie: instead of a dozen Victoria’s Secret numbers, we only own one or two truly good La Perla matching sets. But these are kept in impeccable shape, washed by hand in flaked soap and cold water, ready for the right occasion.
Discretion is at the heart of most of a Frenchwoman’s secrets.
Only our very dearest friend will know our hairdresser’s phone number, the address of our cherished second-hand Issey Miyake shop, or the little trick required to turn out a perfect gateau au chocolat. My own grandmother, when asked for her much-begged personal recipe, used to omit the crucial point that you had to bake it in a bain-marie to keep the result from being too dry.
French women are brought up to believe that their mystique should be like the engine of a Rolls-Royce Corniche — hidden from view at all times.