Emma Cowing: Cheering Lady Gaga’s bare-faced cheek(s)

SHE’S finally done it. Lady Gaga, her of the meat dress, the telephone hat and the not-very-nun-like nun’s habit, has really gone too far.

This week, Gaga – real name Stefanie Germanotta – tweeted a picture of herself with no make-up on.

For a woman who has made a career out of artifice, preferring to hide herself underneath several inches of slap and thousands of pounds worth of designer creations before appearing in public, it was perhaps the most shocking thing she has ever done.

Out there in the celebrity-tastic on-the-cover-of-a-magazine, tweeting-every-five-seconds, always-ready-for-their-close-up land of showbiz, everything is about image and illusion, be it the ageing megastar with the fishnet tights and Botox injections, or the 17-year-old singer who’s already had a nose job. Wrinkles, imperfections and dark circles can be smoothed away with the wave of a Photoshop wand, and women are encouraged to become something that they’re not in order to make it in the fame-soaked worlds of music, film, TV, and standing around pouting (also known as a career in British reality television).

Beauty, it seems now, has become about hiding the real person, whether by surgery or fake tan, rather than allowing anything natural to come through. Perhaps that was why actress Cate Blanchett also caused a storm this week when she allowed herself to be photographed for a magazine cover which used no air-brushing.

Blanchett, 42 and still stunningly beautiful by anyone’s standards, is on the front of this month’s Intelligent Life magazine, peering out coyly from behind the collar of her smart leather jacket, elegant little crow’s feet firmly, and happily, on show.

The fact that the magazine is Intelligent Life and not, say, Cosmopolitan or Vogue, is unsurprising. As US women’s website Jezebel pointed out: “There’s hard news here, which means readers can take the truth of a few wrinkles.” Were it a more female-orientated fashion mag, the readers would presumably pass out in horror at the mere sight of a laughter line. Certainly that’s what their editors seem to think – a quick flick through any fashion magazine these days quickly reveals a coterie of models and celebrities with eerily smooth and perfect skin, the likes of which I’ve never seen in real life on anyone over the age of six.

Indeed, Tim de Lisle, editor of Intelligent Life, explained his decision by remarking that for most actresses who appear in magazines, “their skin is rendered so improbably smooth that, with the biggest stars, you wonder why the photographer didn’t just do a shoot with their waxwork”.

One suspects however, that with the exception of a few rogue daredevils such as Blanchett and Gaga, most stars would rather send the waxwork than their own untouched skin to be photographed.

Women like make-up. That is a given. We like to dress up, to look good (and, if we can, to look young). But at some point in the last decade or so, the reality of looking good has got mixed up with the fantasy of looking perfect.

More and more often, the message that comes ringing down from these self-appointed arbiters of style, fashion and image is that to be imperfect is to be weak and unattractive. That to be perfect is to be relevant and important, and to be imperfect is to be invisible. It is a highly dangerous message, and one that appears to have increasing resonance with young women everywhere.

I am no great fan of Stefanie Germanotta’s music but I applaud her decision to show her bare-faced mug to the world, along with the message “have a beautiful day”.

Lady Gaga has millions of fans around the world, many of whom are insecure teenage girls who every day are pounded with images of their favourite celebrities looking perfect and flawless. They need someone willing to turn away, if only occasionally, from the artifice and glitz, the false tan, fake eyelashes and hair extensions, to get out the cleanser and say “guess what? I can look normal – just like you”.

In these extreme, image-conscious time, young women don’t so much need a female celebrity they can look up to, as one who can look them in the eye.