She PINK!!!

 Happy Saturday everyone from this glamorous Granny!

Our value as Women - or lack thereof.

I realise that I don't write much about the tumultuous side of my life; but THIS is something on my mind. Be warned - the curve from rhinestoning to this post is a steep one. But it's been brewing.
The above is me. I am 53, about a size 26, 5' 10". I love what I see in the mirror, because it is what I have to work with. I didn't get to be this way because one day when I was super modelling I thought, "eh this sucks, I'm eating all the pies." I was born and have always been a fat person.
For MANY people, this means I am less than human. I am a drain on the tax payer, lazy, unmotivated blah blah blah. For someone who is clearly MORE than, I am LESS than.
I live with this and am fairly inured to it as a result, however from time to time it cross-ignites with other things in life and I get angry.
Women readers, do you understand and relate to the experience that men make so many decisions about women based on how f*ckable we are? Men reading, please hang in there because this is important.
The woman above is unf*ckable. She is too old now to breed and she's fat so basically, she's almost invisible. Not to those who know her but walking down the street, in the supermarket, just not there.
THIS woman is f*ckable:

Yeah, right...

THIS woman gets hit on all the time. This is by men of all ages and types too. Mostly younger than me. It is not even remotely flattering; really, being hit on by someone who can't see past thick makeup, fake hair and eyebrows and sparkly clothes is like being attacked by a magpie.

SO here's what I am beginning to work out. When I was fertile, I was not every guy's idea of being f*ckable. Fat women or women who prefer to dress and groom in a masculine way (I'm going to use the word "butch" for this), have taken themselves out of trying to be as f*ckable as possible and are treated as LESS all the time. I know a disturbing number of butch women who have been beaten up, I have been threatened myself. From the oiks hanging out car windows driving past shouting out insults just so I am absolutely sure that I am unf*ckable to them, to the physical menacing that can also happen.
HOW DARE a woman of fertile age take themselves out of the game like that?
Since I hit menopause and got old and invisible, I don't get this any more. Age is something that clearly we can't help. Women who colour their hair, get face lifts or whatever and try to push back on age - they risk being judged as having failed in their attempts, although I notice this is a BIG driver for many women. I didn't realise how anxious I was not to be seen as a woman trying to push back, but it appears that I occur like that when I am Constance. Because men hit on me, women want makeup tips and I get told off when I do makeup looks that are not pretty. Like this:

It's not about looking pretty, people!

So where did this all come from? Well, on another blog I read, this image was posted, and the commenters went to town judging and speculating among themselves the relative value of the model Tess Holliday (not that anyone gave her her name as a human being) and WHY the magazine did this.

Source

For me, this is a great example of the purpose of modelling being accurate for once. Fat women find it hard to work out if RTW clothes will fit and suit them if they cannot see them on a model who represents them. Cosmo is helping to market a product to a demographic of women that is underrepresented in fashion publications, to the detriment of the industry.
But what most people see is something quite different. They see an unf*ckable on the cover of a mag and they are affronted. Because obviously a women's magazine cover is there to appeal to men, right?
SO much judgement about "The Obese" about Tess, about Cosmopolitan.
FFS people, it's a magazine cover, not an invitation for sex. WHY oh WHY must everything be about whether men want to f*ck us, how appalling it is to present as unf*ckable, how worthless we are if we are no longer f*ckable, how hopeless we are if we cannnot maintain a level of f*ckability.

I'm not sure I've nailed how I feel about this or the issue at all, but the women I have talked to about it are not at all surprised by this theory. They often hadn't thought of it quite that way but it lands as very real when they do.
To the men in the world, you have a 0.03 second moment when you decide if you would f*ck a woman or not, you can't help it but you are not animals, you can choose how you respond. Please consider that we may not care, we may not be interested, we may have other things on our minds and other intentions. PLEASE mind your own business.

Weimar? Vy not?

Sorry about the heading! (not sorry!)
Recently I had a photo shoot with a 1920s Weimaresque vibe, which is quite different from my usual look. So I did some research into makeup styles; good grief that Great Gatsby movie has a lot to answer for!
This one was by far the most fun and had a really good look:

It's also a masterclass in eyebrow blocking. I found it very inspiring, trouble is like most 1920s looks for women, the result is a sort of "worried and vulnerable" look that really doesn't suit Constance, who is neither!
So, I cherry picked the aspects that I liked, and adapted it for my own look.

I also adore the looks in Cabaret the Movie - while heavily influenced by 1970s fashion, the use of colour really adds to the sense of a surreal world of crazy stuff that is the Club. I love that. I don't so much love Minelli's "bedroom eyes" so I underplayed that aspect of the look.

Selfies taken on the day. I know the green is quite vivid but most of the photos will be in some kind of unsaturated state if not actually black and white, and I am enjoying playing with green right now. Brings out the gold in my eyes. And, Cabaret! I didn't overdraw my mouth, and finished it off just a tiny bit inside its natural width. Pale base, over blushed cheeks, big lower lashes, thin brows, shadow starting under them and sweeping out to join the rest. All this is fairly new to me. Such fun!
So what do you think? Can you imagine this face singing a Kurt Weil song?

Mary Poppins rides again.

Now I know that green eyeshadow, glitter and pink lipstick are far from the usual Mary Poppins look but Drag Mary is a different story! Also I climbed out of this costume into others.
You can't see it but I nailed the fake eye crease look finally. It's where you draw a new crease above the natural one and it's used on stage to make one's eyes look bigger.

Makeup is such an odd thing. I personally have very little time for it and my only concession is lipstick. The whole idea of painting on a face every day just to go to work, or out to dinner, bored me, it's a tedious chore. But using it to do crazy things like moving my eyebrows up, contouring etc for a character - that is interesting to me. I don't aspire to look beautiful or sexy, but to look like Constance, who is neither - like clown makeup.
Hey ho!