TANYA SWEENEY Mum-shaming Katie Price for society’s insane beauty ideals is unfair

Most little girls want to look like Mummy. Give me an under-10 who hasn’t put on her mother’s necklaces or nicked her lipstick, and I’ll eat my own mascara.

Which is why the reported backlash against Katie Price rings all the more curious. The glamour model, who has five children (Harvey, 21, Junior, 18, Princess, 16, Jett, 10, and Bunny, nine) appears to be a bit live-and-let-live when it comes to her young kids dressing up. And, as is the way with a meddlesome and fairly conservative public, “concern” has been “sparked” (heavy air quotes here).

Earlier this week, Price appeared at an entrepreneur brunch in Nottingham with Bunny in tow as a de facto event assistant. Bunny looked every inch the part for a glamorous entrepreneur event, wearing expertly applied make-up, a crop top, and the sort of vertiginous stilettos that most grown women have abandoned since the pandemic. All credit to her, the nine-year-old was a true pro in the heels. Previously, Bunny has appeared on Price’s Instagram wearing false eyelashes. Captioning yet another Instagram post in which Bunny wore make-up, Price wrote: “My stunning Bunny bops.”

And it’s true, Bunny is beautiful, the way all nine-year-olds are. But the cluster of photos have given people the perfect opportunity to trounce Price in a spot of classic mum-shaming. “Let her be a child ffs some people never learn” was just one of the comments aimed at Price.

Many online commenters love nothing more than a spot of celeb- rity mud-slinging, while dressing it up as “won’t someone think of the children?” faux-concern. And given that Price is a cosmetic-surgery veteran who has had an array of procedures down the years, her baseline idea of “natural” beauty might not exactly tally with everyone else’s.

For that reason, it’s likely that fans reckon that five-inch heels and falsies are the first stop on a slippery slope.

In an ideal world, we would be telling our young girls that make-up and heels are for fun, that they’re for dressing up and that it’s not at all serious. But you don’t need to be Katie Price to understand that for many grown-up women, make-up is much more than that. It’s a psychological crutch.

It bolsters and prepares women to face the outside world. It’s conforming to a specific standard of beauty, and one that most women, no matter how accomplished, sensible or smart, feel duty-bound to adhere to. Most of us women spend hundreds of euro on make-up, beauty products and various accoutrements specifically created to sort this flaw and that shortcoming.

And what youngster can’t help but pick up that message? That we need to put on an array of pricey products just to feel “normal” enough to leave the house?

Now, you might have noticed that Katie Price and I are quite different people. I’ve yet to fall for the charms of Turkey teeth or boob jobs: my Botox regime has yet to begin. And yet I’m not impervious to a potion that promises a glow, or active ingredients that make many promises.

My five-year-old has already picked up on this. “What’s this?” she asked recently, holding up a mascara. I felt a bit of an idiot explaining that it makes your eyelashes longer. Eyeshadow? Makes your eyelids a different colour. Eyeliner? Because you want to change the shape of your God-given eye.

“But you don’t need any of this, because your eyes and lashes are lovely and perfect,” I told her. She looked highly dubious. In recent weeks, she has asked more than once, “Am I pretty?” This is not because I, her mother, am a slave to beauty in the Katie Price leagues. It’s because this stuff is in our culture, everywhere and beyond our control.

The jury is out, but maybe Katie sees mascara and lipstick on her nine-year-old as a harmless bit of recreational fun for her daughter; something Bunny might have pestered her for repeatedly. Blame culture for that, not Katie.