SAGGY SUPERMODEL
Smoking, tanning take toll on Moss
AT THE highend spa I frequent in London, billboard photos on every wall show Kate Moss in those Kérastase hair product ads – big hair, chiselled cheekbones, perfect skin, mouth parted in ecstasy.
God, I think, if only I looked like that.
Maybe I’ll have a glass of champagne while the hair dye does its job, too, because Kate drinks and she still looks incredible. In fact, in the Kérastase ads she looks better, aged almost 40, than when she was starting out.
Maybe the fashion and beauty industries are right. Perhaps you can reverse time, because Kate has done it, and she is its poster girl. And so, when I look at photos of the real Kate Moss on holiday in the Med – showing a face so different from her appearance in a recent issue of Vogue, where she took up 18 pages and the front cover, looking like an 18-yearold Brigitte Bardot – I feel duped, frankly.
Of course, Kate is still beautiful, but she is not, nor has she ever been, perfect. And while it might seem unfair to pore over these unadulterated, off-duty photos, remember two things. Kate made millions by making us want to emulate her. And second, that to realise what Kate is like in the flesh will encourage wobbly women to shrug off their sarongs and reveal their own imperfect bodies on the beach.
Kate has an anchor tattooed on her right wrist and a large design at the small of her back. Tattoos are problematic in fashion, and are often airbrushed out so as not to distract from the product. Here, the tattoos only signpost the downward trajectory of her rearend. Tattoos can stretch and distort with loss of skin tone.
Kate has a Champagne tummy: it must be the bubbles, the empty calories, and the fact that the morning after drinking it, you are far too dizzy to do sit-ups.
Kate, too, I think, has the ghost of a Caesarean scar, and her shape isn’t helped by her awful posture. Above all, this is something of an ironic tummy, given she was the pin-up for skeletal heroin chic. It’s a tummy that will do more for the health of young women than any number of admonishing articles and eating disorder helplines.
Why does Kate go for strapless bandeau bikini tops? Unless you are 16, strapless bras tend to rapidly become belts. While I applaud a chest that has not been augmented by a surgeon, it still needs help.
Meanwhile, her rear is flat, rather than muscular and shapely. She has saddle bags – the blobby bit at the top of the thighs. But then, Kate has never really liked her legs, as they’re shorter than is the norm for a supermod
el.
Scraped back, her hair only exposes the beginnings of a double chin, and makes her look drawn rather than youthful. A bit of a contrast to the recent Vogue shoot where Kate’s right cheekbone juts out so improbably.
Kate has never had good, thick hair, and after years of being straightened, back combed, dyed and heated, it is a mere shadow of its former self. And her giant sunnies hide crow’s feet from too much squinting at the sun and, of course, too much smoking.
Then, there’s that over-baked, bottom-of-the-cake-tin-parchment decolletage, thanks to the fact she has spent most of her life on a beach, ever since posing, aged just 14, topless for The Face magazine. Of all the parts of the body that show our age, this kind of mahogany bib is hardest to cure.
Like all of us, Kate assumed she would never get old. Model Marie Helvin once told me that she, too, posed in a bikini, slathered in coconut oil, for decades and now has the skin to show for it. So, protect yourself, young women, from the sun and from being exploited.
How do you have a mouth that is a perfect, chiselled rosebud when you have smoked for most of your life? Or that untroubled brow as seen in glossy magazines? You don’t. Not without Botox, collagen, filler – and airbrushing. My wager is Kate’s Botox is wearing off. – Daily Mail