A plague on the airheads laughing at our misery from Dubai
WHAT’S the collective noun for a ‘celebrity i nfluencer’? A pout? A preen? A freebie? An airbrush? Any or all would do, I’d say. I would probably settle for a vacuum, on the basis that nothing fits the description of a space devoid of matter quite as well as t his breed of glossy, selfobsessed airheads.
They were everywhere last week after the Government introduced a two-week quarantine for travellers returning from Dubai, which is the natural habitat of the commonor- garden British influencer. Makes sense, I suppose: Dubai is an overpriced, artificial city wholly devoid of the slightest scintilla of culture. In other wo r d s , celebrity influencer heaven.
Anyway, a number of them have found themselves stranded. And since the prospect of being quarantined in anything less than seven-star luxury is anathema to these professional freeloaders (the breakfast buffet at the Heathrow Travelodge might not quite meet their exacting standards), they plan to stay in Dubai for the foreseeable future. Working, apparently.
YOU have to admit, it’s a gruelling schedule. Lounging around in the sun, wearing bikinis, sipping cocktails. All that waxing and moisturising, not to mention the hours it must take to apply 72 layers of lip gloss or blow dry their tresses. And that’s just the blokes.
Quite honestly, the poor loves must be exhausted. Those frontline NHS nurses don’t know they’re born. After all, they don’t have to live with the constant fear of waking up with a spot on their chin, or being caught with a chipped nail, do they? They can just cover it all up with PPE.
When I was growing up there was this extraordinary thing – call it
TALKING of influencers, one of the biggest names in the business – Zoella (aka Zoe Sugg) – has been removed from the GCSE syllabus for promoting sex toys to her followers. A bit inappropriate, perhaps – but surely the real scandal is that she was even on the syllabus in the first place? ‘sanity’ – where you actually had to be something or do something useful before anyone took any notice of you, let alone started paying you for your services. But social media, and with it the obsession with follower numbers as a measure of success, has changed all that. Now you can earn a decent living from simply making a spectacle of yourself. The only real surprise is quite how many do. Queen of celebrity influencers is, of course, Kim Kardashian, whose own vulgarity exemplifies the breed. But her sister, Kylie Jenner, is arguably worse. Last week she caused a stir when she appeared virtually unrecognisable in the trailer for the final series of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, her face a characterless assemblage of Instagram cliches: almond-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, arched brows, plump lips. The fact that, having started out as a perfectly pretty girl, she now resembles a
I’M glad Kate admits homeschooling leaves her exhausted. Makes the rest of us feel a tiny bit less inadequate. But it also begs the question: if it’s tough for her, in her big house with plenty of help, what must it be like in a tiny flat with no outside space?
blow-up doll would be neither here nor there were she not an A-list influencer. She has 200 million followers on social media and a $1billion fortune largely based on selling make-up to impressionable girls desperate to emulate their idol.
Except Jenner’s look is very little to do with her products and almost everything to do with the fact that she has a face full of fillers – something she initially denied but which last year she fessed up to.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m partial to the odd bit of Botox myself, and I enjoy sharing my thoughts on social media. But I haven’t grown rich by pretending to be something I’m not and exploiting the insecurities of young girls and women struggling in a social media jungle where appearance is more important than ever. And that’s what really gets me about these influencers, and especially the motley lot holed up in Dubai, laughing at the rest of us back home in lockdown.
They’re not doing any of this for anyone else; there’s no real sense of their followers being anything other than cash cows for their own enjoyment. It’s just a bunch of people who think the world owes them a living. And will stop at nothing to get it.