Mirror Fasting

I read a completely bizarre item in the newspaper the other day.

Apparently, women who can’t cope with the stress of having to look good all the time, in these image conscious days, are now avoiding the mirror entirely.  It’s called mirror fasting.  Allegedly, and I say allegedly because I read this in a newspaper, so it may not be entirely true, these women become so stressed about their hair, their makeup, their weight and their clothes that they have to do something to combat the pressure.

Have you ever heard anything so completely mental in all your life?

There’s actually a name now, for when you lose all hope of staying size ten, and looking twenty years old, and give up on the whole thing.

Mirror fasting.

In the good old days, which is sadly what I’m being forced to call my twenties now, it was perfectly normal and common to give up looking in the mirror for long periods of time. It was the halcyon days of grunge.  As long as you washed yourself, you were fine.

Even these days, I have far more non mirror days than mirror days.

I don’t look in the mirror when the infernal eyebrows are making a show of me.  Or when the snow white roots of my hair are showing.  Or most days, in fact, because the “falls back into place” haircut I’ve been tricked into paying for is standing out at all sorts of mental angles to my head.

But guess what?

I’ve never “mirror fasted” in my life.  I just haven’t looked in the mirror.  And I think that’s absolutely fine.

Who among us, in all honesty, is completely happy with the way we look?  Very few, I’d imagine.

I realise that I’m going to sound a hundred years old when I say this. But I really believe the whole nonsense of fake tan and fake eyelashes has gone too far.  If we’re going to live in a world where we have to have the eyelashes of Daisy the cow, and the hair of Cheryl Cole, just to go to work in the frigging morning, I’m perfectly happy to never look in the mirror.

I have a brain, and a personality, I hope.  And if I don’t, fake hair and eyelashes aren’t going to get me through life anyway.

I know I’m fat, and going grey, and should put on my makeup at six o’clock every morning, but honestly I cannot be arsed.  I’d rather spend the fifteen minutes getting an extra little sleep. 

I’d just like to make it perfectly clear that when I turn up in the morning with a visage that will frighten the life out of my colleagues, I’m not mirror fasting.

I’m just not buying into the nonsense of getting stressed out over my mirror image.