I remember being quite shocked when I first saw Britney Spears on TV. There was an incredible media buzz about her, but she wasn’t my idea of a teen idol at all. She was certainly very far from the American Beauty stereotype. She wasn’t a tall, skinny blonde with chiselled cheekbones, big boobs and no ass, like Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton – girls who seem to come with an automatic pass into the photo agencies’ roll of merit. She was brunette, with soft features and big brown eyes. She was small and stocky, with a curvaceous bottom.
It was fairly obvious that Britney’s handlers had the same reservations about her physical image. All the videos from the BOMT era focused attention on the soulful, empathetic qualities of her face and on the warm and lovable vibes of her personality. She looked like a sweet little neighbor, a girl to fall in love with and to marry, not an Amazonian Hollywood princess or sex goddess.
Yet at the same time the somewhat unexpected Lolita controversy created by her first video indicated a sexual direction that could not realistically be ignored. And so, while a wholesome looking Britney paraded before us on MTV, a parallel universe came into being in which a hot, curvy little babe with come-to-bed eyes disported herself on the cover of Rolling Stone and in many men’s magazines shortly thereafter.
In fact, for quite some time the men’s magazines and websites weren’t quite sure what to make of her. She was clearly a phenomenon, and seemed to be exerting a strange power over people. Yes, she was pretty. Yes, she was young and nubile. But was she really beautiful? There was a lot of doubt. One writer said her eyes were too dark and inscrutable for that.
The Spears campaign train setting out on its journey to world domination could have run into an unfortunate siding at that point, with Britney categorised as “interesting” but incapable of sustaining the attention of the celeb industry for very much longer. And so we entered an era of image reconstruction. Starting with the Oops-era videos and most definitely throughout the “Britney” period, we saw the girl-next-door from rural Louisiana gradually get as close as is humanly possible to becoming a tall (or tall-looking) skinny blonde herself. And it was on the back of that image that she became the world’s favorite cover-girl for most of the period from 2001 to 2003.
But she was able to add her own special elements to that image. For a start, although careful wardrobe and photography made her legs look longer and her boobs bigger, she still seemed a little fuller of figure than the standard Playboy centrefold. But at this point in the history of female beauty, that was no longer the disadvantage it had once been. Jennifer Lopez had already blazed a trail along which curvy, big-bottomed girls like Shakira, Beyonce and Britney could now progress to the highest levels of male admiration.
And Britney had another secret advantage over most of her peers and competitors. Psychologists tell us that most people are programmed to respond with nurturing and protective instincts to a face with eyes set wide apart, because that’s the way a baby looks. That’s why everyone loved ET the Extraterrestrial. And Britney’s eyes are very wide apart. Perhaps that one simple thing is the reason why her fans are so extremely loyal and defensive. Complain though she may about her “big nose”, it’s a fact that she has always possessed a special loveability factor that has guaranteed her a huge share, not just of fascination, but of care, empathy and genuine concern.
But whatever about her loveability, her beauty was, at the peak of its reputation, in the celebrity world’s Premier League. In his book about successful seduction techniques “The Game”, Neil Strauss observes that Britney was “one of the most desired women in the world”. For years there was constant speculation that she would pose nude in “Playboy”, and in fact, it’s been reported that millions of dollars were on offer if she agreed to do so. And it would have been money well spent - it was reckoned that if she had appeared in Playboy, the world would have come to a temporary halt on the day that issue hit the newsstands.
Does that seem an exaggerated assessment of her sexual power? Consider this. quote from a famous photographer, Marcus Klinko, who has portrayed many of the world’s most beautiful and famous women: “Britney would be the hottest woman I have ever photographed, she was super sexy. At the time, she was just unbelievable,” he said, referring to a large-scale, garden-themed shoot with the pop princess at the beginning of 2004.
So the campaign to present Britney as an outstanding beauty was working... beautifully. The early doubts had been dispelled and her impact upon male consciousness was now unambiguous. In the introduction to his interview with her in GQ Magazine in November 2003, Dylan Jones remarked “I wouldn’t imagine that many of the men in my gym are dedicated consumers of Britney Spears’ CDs, but to them she is as famous as Madonna, and about 20 times sexier. Britney is a proper post-modern sexual icon.... a libidinous deity... sex incarnate.”
In 2004, she was crowned FHM’s “Sexiest Woman In The World”, the magazine commenting “It was inevitable. In the last twelve months no woman has touched Britney Spears for unadulterated sex appeal.” But sadly, we were about to see an astonishing and totally unexpected playing-out of the dictum that the higher you climb the harder you fall. In 2005’s FHM poll of Sexiest Women In The World she didn’t even make the top 100.
Obviously every celebrity has his or her haters and everyone who observes and comments on celebrities has his or her preferences. Thus, it would be ridiculous to claim that up to a certain point in time EVERYONE thought Britney was a beautiful woman. A contrary view comes with the territory. But there had always been a distinctive and unusual undercurrent of female opposition to the perception of Britney Spears as beautiful. On any occasion that a women’s magazine had put together a top 20 of “natural beauties” her name had always been conspicuously absent.
This seems particularly odd when you consider that Jenny Eliscu (Observer 2001) remarked of Britney that “she has a natural beauty that even the best photographs of her don't reveal. “ W Magazine agreed in 2003: “Britney Spears is... almost frighteningly perfect looking (more so in person than on TV), with blooming skin and big, sparkling eyes...” Sean Smith, in his biography of Justin Timberlake, comments on how stunned Justin’s friends back home were by Britney’s beauty when they met her in person. And classic Male Chauvinist website Askmen.com rated her 80% for natural beauty.
But clearly there were always those who had a problem with her, and it had something to do with naturalness. So what was the problem? Well clearly she’s not a natural blonde, and most of the time the hair on her head isn’t actually hers, but I don’t think that’s what the magazines were thinking about. There’s been controversy about the provenance of Britney’s “assets” almost from the start of her career. Her boobs looked strangely and untypically large on the notorious Kids’ Choice Awards and suddenly everyone was on the “Boob job! Boob job!!!” bandwagon. A pity they didn’t wait till the following day and take another look just to confirm what they thought they’d seen. But the damage was done, and the skepticism that attached to her then has never left her since.
Oddly though, this one incident is pretty much the only day in her life when Britney’s boobs didn’t look natural. An amusing video has been around for years, showing that her boobs appear to become larger and smaller on an almost daily basis, causing one fan to speculate that she can inflate them when she wants to, using a hidden pump. Thing is though - they never have a siliconed look. If she HAS had a boob job, she should demand her money back. In my opinion, her breasts aren’t all that big in the sense of protruding a long way, but they do have fullness, which allows them to be squashed into many different shapes and that’s why they look different from one day to another.
One mean-minded observer at the opening of the ill-fated NYLA New York restaurant venture commented that up close, her boobs actually looked slightly droopy. I guess what this tells us is precisely what UK singer Alesha Dixon discovered while making a documentary about female beauty and unrealistic expectations - namely that the “silicone” sticky-out, pointy look is now so common that many guys think it’s both normal and natural. When UK band “Steps” supported Britney on tour, a journalist asked for their verdict on the vexing subject of the reality of her boobs and they said “We couldn’t really ask her to show us, but they looked natural to us!”
There have been doubts about other things too. It’s beyond dispute that she’s had her teeth fixed. They weren’t very even to begin with, but they’re perfect now. But what about her nose? Some people swear she’s had a nose job. I used to have some bitter online arguments about it, because the so-called “evidence” was always two photographs taken from different angles, in different light, with different make-up and with a different expression on her face. But if she HAS had a nose job, her mother and sister must have had exactly the same nose job since their noses are identical to Britney’s.
However - anyone whose opinion on Britney’s beauty was leaning towards the negative were to find, in late 2004, that the lady herself was ready and willing to help them make up their minds once and for all. Unlike most stars, who are basically in love with themselves, Britney has always been (in the words of Neil Strauss) “an LSE girl” - she has low self-esteem. She doesn’t think much of herself, and thus does not appear to place any value on the need to guard and protect her image. She told OK Magazine in April 2004 “I see so many women who are so sexy because they’re confident and I try to do that. But I don’t find myself sexy, not at all!” She added that she could walk down the street and go shopping or to a restaurant. “I just put my hat on and go out. Half the time nobody recognises me. When I get my make-up off I’m just like a regular girl.”
But if Britney really thought there was still some chance of strolling around the shops unrecognized, looking like a regular girl, she couldn’t have been more wrong. Maybe she didn’t realise it, but Los Angeles was just beginning to feel the full blast of a perfect storm involving the photo agencies and a new breed of ruthless paparazzi on a feeding frenzy. Following a legal ruling in the UK that protected the privacy of individuals, many British paps took off for America, where no such protection existed and it was open season on celebrities.
The celebrity photo agencies, hungry and ultra-competitive, didn’t take long to realise that they were in the business of selling news, not just images. And a picture of a beautiful pop star looking beautiful wasn’t news. It was old. However, a picture of a supposedly beautiful pop star looking flawed or even downright ugly was gold dust. The photo agencies began compiling files of celebrities looking bad. And an unholy host of customers was ready and droolingly eager to buy them. So-called celebrity blogs and bloggers sprang up like weeds. Gossip columns were staffed by oh-so-ironic, oh-so-bitchy smart-little-girls-with-no-heart.
For a hundred years sages and scholars had been telling us that “the camera does not lie” , but it no longer told the truth as we knew it. Paparazzi no longer took single snaps or even half a dozen with a motor wind like in the old days. Now we were in the era of the digital “burst”. Burst mode, also known as continuous shooting mode, is where you take multiple photos in extremely quick succession, in some cases as many as 60 per second. It has respectable uses in analysing someone’s golf swing or pole-vaulting technique, but that’s not how celebrity photo agencies began to use it.
They noticed that, if a celebrity pulled her head back in surprise, there was a nanosecond where it looked like she had a double chin. If she coughed or sneezed, there was a nanosecond where she seemed to be weeping from puffy, half-closed eyes. If she was wearing a bikini and straightened her leg, there was a nanosecond where the contraction of her gluteal muscles looked somewhat like cellulite. She could be made to look angry, outraged, drugged-up, crazy or insane if you broke her everyday familiar actions down into nanoseconds. The determination to find these nanoseconds was beyond sickening and well into pure evil. And Britney was their most regular victim.
The photo agencies had also realised that “news” means “stories”, not just random pictures. In other words, they had to guide the public to read meaning or significance (and preferably evidence of moral fallibility) into the pictures. To achieve this, they began to provide ready-made captions that tied the nanoseconds to a sneery, snarky ongoing commenatary or “script”. And the erstwhile babe of babes Britney Spears was about to provide them with a script they could never have envisioned in their wildest dreams. Soon the girl who once told an interviewer “Yes, I am a Southern Belle” was to morph into someone who was EXACTLY what the “continuous shooting mode” was intended to destroy.
When Britney busted her knee on the set of the misguided “Outrageous” video and was gifted a welcome opportunity to cancel the remainder of her arduous and (to her) unwanted Onyx Hotel tour, she gave an almost audible sigh of relief and decided to slob out for a while. In her own subsequent words, she “let herself go”. But not in private. Every day the tabloids contained pictures of an increasingly fat, greasy-haired, coarse featured, spotty, cigarette-wielding young lady who seemed the perfect embodiment of the words “trailer trash”, which promptly became her media identity. She never lived on a trailer park, she went to good schools and was a teacher’s daughter, but she managed to mess up her appearance so much that everyone was ready to believe it. In Celeb Land you always judge a book by its cover. Even if it’s the cover off a different book.
It’s hard to realise it now, with hindsight’s distorted view, but the “fat, spotty” nightmare didn’t actually last that long. What soon followed was much better in some ways but worse in others. Towards the end of 2004, Britney began to take a little more care of her appearance. The acne on her chin and the skin irritation around her cheekbones that had been bothering her since late 2003 began to disappear. She became slim again. Her hair, often unkempt and pinned “up”, could still be a horror show but often she looked pretty damn good. She looked nothing less than fabulous in the photos from her wedding to Kevin Federline. Most days she was still dressing down, but on her athletic body the combination of jeans or shorts and T-shirt was perfect. The T-shirt usually bore an ironic message, but one was particularly troubling: “MILF in training”.
And so it came to pass. Our formerly perfect, pristine pop princess with the formerly perfect, pristine body was pregnant throughout most of 2005, giving birth to Sean Preston Federline in September. Yes, she glowed as pregnant women do. Her boobs became enormous. Her skin improved still further and has been spot-free ever since. For a pregnant woman she looked great. But with an enormous belly, added weight and proud-mommy expression increasingly visible on her face, she didn’t look like a girl anymore, nor even in between a girl and a woman. Then we heard that her baby was delivered by elective Caesarian, so she had a big scar too. There would be a lot to hide if she ever DID decide to do “Playboy”...
And the nightmare was by no means over. In 2006 it happened all over again. But by this time the shock of our babygirl becoming a mommy had worn off and we were better able to appreciate how serene and beautiful she often looked. She decided to do the now-traditional celebrity “naked-ish and pregnant” photoshoot, which was published in Harpers Bazaar in August. The pictures were truly gorgeous, and for once I could see how appealing a plump and contented Britney could look. There were many, many surprised and delighted responses and much favorable editorial in the women’s magazines. But at this time, in other places, Britney’s “script” was still “ugly girl” and many of the comments in online blogs reflected this hard-to-shake perception. Some even claimed that she was so ugly in real life that the Harpers pictures had to be fake. “Pregnant and desperate!” “Trashy trailer girl goes nude!” “No longer at her physical peak!” “Now lean into the bucket and release!” “Hideous!”
Then came the “divorcing Kevin, party girl, fraternising with Paris Hilton and showing her vag” era. In objective terms, Britney had turned the corner and was far from the fat, spotty girl who provided such justification for the “ugly” script. But it was 2007, and the nightmare of all nightmares was about to begin. While she was actually partying with Paris, she looked great. Her boobs were still enlarged as a legacy of her recent childbirth and looked wonderful. But when she stopped partying with her new girlfriends every night, her weight began to go up and down.
Under Sam Lutfi’s guidance, she began to party with the paparazzi instead, and they seized their many opportunities to make her look worse than ever, even going to such lengths as lying on the ground to get pictures up her skirt. They struck gold again. Pictures purportedly showing that she had failed to shave her anal area provoked further snarky comment from predictable sources. Hardly anybody in the media bothered to protest that she was not expecting to be photographed from below and had no reason to prepare for it, nor that taking photographs like that, in that way, really is a gross invasion of privacy and goes far beyond legitimate reportage or reasonable decency.
Despite these continuing and increasingly desperate and ruthless attacks, she still looked sporadically beautiful. However, her appearance at the 2007 VMAs served to confirm to many shocked-but-not-really-surprised observers that she wasn’t the sex object she once had been. As fans, we held our heads in our hands and rocked slowly back and forth, if not “shaking and crying” then certainly groaning with dismay.
However, it is one of God’s mercies that celebrities are not allowed to have more than one major “script” at any one time. “Bad mommy” began to replace “Beautiful girl turned ugly” almost the second after Sean Preston was born, and the unholy alliance of paparazzi and photo agencies were in heaven once more. But “bad mommy Britney” was no more than a ripple compared to what was to take place in late 2007 and early 2008. The notorious “head shaving” incident should perhaps have been a line in the sand for the media, but they gleefully got to work on another script for Britney that at first appeared bizarre and amusing, but soon became tinged with genuine shock, sympathy and sadness. “Crazy Britney” was born, and hardly anyone bothered to jeer at the presumed ugliness of her bald head.
Strangely though, even at this disturbing point, perceptions of Britney were far from clear-cut. I shall call “rewind!” and transport you to a parallel universe whose Big Bang of creation took place in 2004. It seems self-evident that the point of celebrity endorsements is to allow ordinary people to bathe vicariously in the stardust, glamor and desirability of the Beautiful People. One does not anticipate buying Marilyn Manson branded couture dresses or Meatloaf branded underwear. So what are we to make of the stunning success of Britney’s perfumes? Do girls who buy them not know or care about her alleged ugliness, or do they perhaps not see her as ugly at all? May we even think the unthinkable - that they actually see her as beautiful and glamorous?
Wikipedia tells us that “Spears endorsed her first Elizabeth Arden fragrance "Curious" in 2004, and earned $100 million in sales in the five weeks after its 2004 release. In September 2005, Spears released the fragrance "Fantasy" with Elizabeth Arden, which also saw great success. Curious was named the best selling perfume of 2004, and one of the best selling perfumes ever. To date (October 2008), Curious has sold over 650 million bottles. Following the success of "Curious", Spears released her next Elizabeth Arden fragrance, "Fantasy", in September 2005. 2006 saw the release of yet another perfume: "Midnight Fantasy". September 24, 2007 marked the release date of a new fragrance collection "Believe". She released "Curious Heart" in January 2008. It has so far sold over 35 million bottles. Spears has grossed over US1 billion from perfume sales, and has sold over 850 million bottles of perfume Worldwide. Britney has the number 1 selling celebrity fragrance line on the market. Her Elizabeth Arden scents make up 34% of total celebrity fragrance sales...”
The same thing is happening with her Candies endorsement. She has now completed three seasons for the brand, which is apparently unusual in itself. And recently Reuters reported: “When pop icon Britney Spears tweeted a sneak-peak picture of a new outfit from her line for the Candie's brand, the fashions swiftly became a top seller at department store Kohl's Corp.” "When she Twitters, it actually sells thousands of products within 24 hours," added Neil Cole, chief executive of Candie's owner Iconix Brand Group Inc. As Cliff Watts, photographer for Britney’s self-designed limited edition, noted “She’s a beautiful girl.... every picture has a little ‘wow’ factor to it.” He said that in 2010.
We are in the “Conservatorship” era. Britney herself may seem more distant from us than ever, but - whether by choice or by coercion - her appearance has been on a plateau of fairly consistent excellence for some time now. The skin of her face has attained a kind of pale luminosity and her features seem, at times, even finer than they did in the golden years of 2000-2003. Her weight has remained stable, pretty much constantly since the 2007 VMAs. Even some of the fan forum begrudgers have been known to admit that she’s looking good again. When they’re not emphasizing her craziness, the press have begun to refer to her again as “the pop babe”, “the pop beauty” or “the beautiful singer”, so that seems to be the default zone for her public image.
Two babies, several years of tear-stained craziness and a lot of “letting herself go” later, and despite years of brutal paparazzi activity apparently focused on showing her in the worst possible light, she’s still winning polls. After many delicious pap shots of Britney in a series of very skimpy bikinis, she was OK Mag’s Best Body of 2009. “She has the ideal body,” they commented. She’s Billboard’s “Sexiest Woman In Music”, 2010. And, after dropping off the Top 100 completely a few years ago, she’s back at No.4 on the FHM US list of the World’s Sexiest Women.
A quick gallop around the internet uncovers countless admirers of Britney’s beauty and physique. A visit to just one site, the wonderful PoorBritney.com, harvested all of the following from one day in 2010: “She looks fabulous!” “She looks pouty and yummy, I just want to spank her hot little ass!” “Her face is just unbelievable. Look at those features. She literally IS DOLLface. Those huge eyes, tiny perfect nose and those perfect lips. What a beautiful woman.” “Woww she looks sooo pretty!”
The snarkery hasn’t gone away. She still has plenty of mean-minded, sneery-mouthed, vindictive haters ready to comment nastily on her every appearance on celebrity blogs, gossip sites and message boards. Their sad little mission in life is to inform anyone who may be interested that she’s a “fugly bitch whore”,”she’s fat”, “she probably smells”, “her body is stumpy and thick like a man’s”, “my granny has better tits” and “if she was laying there naked in front of me I’d walk away”.
But I think that after all of these years of ups and downs and the eventual level of approval and admiration by those whose opinions are more trustworthy, we can discount that kind of bitterness as reflecting more upon the mentality of the commentators than upon Britney herself. I know she DOES frustrate her genuine admirers as much as she delights us, but I think the truth of the matter is simply this: Britney Spears is the girl of 1000 looks. With different lighting, different hairdo, different make-up and different photographers, she can go from one extreme to the other. Sure, she can look rough at times but so can anybody. Why should we think that an unkempt look is the real Britney any more than it would be the real Beyonce or real Rihanna if they ever for a second let their guard down? The point is that - cleaned up, hair did and with light but sympathetic make-up - most women look good. But Britney Spears has the very, very rare capacity to look absolutely AMAZING.
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