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In this
section

A
time for happiness

The
monstrous in the magnificent

Zolissimo

Flight
from reality

A
funny thing happened

A
taste of Liberté

Things
you only know if you're not at work

How
to wear clothes

Wear
it now

The
measure

The
new black

All
made up

Mirror
mirror

All
the men I've never slept with

Off
with a bang

Almost
a grown-up

We
love each other

Ask
Emma

Strike
a balance

End
these no-go zones

I'
ve got pots for you

To
DIY for

To
die for

The
acid test

Benares
17/20

The
perfect... green beens

Super
plonk

Down
in one

Cold
comfort

Linford
Christie

How
to... be glum

Dear
Weekend

Q&A

Flight from reality

Colouring our hair is
the norm, fake tan routine. We love the smell of artificial leather, hate
new-mown grass. Do we even know what 'real' is any more? Laura Barton
explores the all-consuming fascination with the fake

Saturday August 16, 2003
The Guardian

Friday night,
midsummer, and the air is thick with the smell of fake tan. The
honey-limbed lovelies are out on the razzle in a blur of high heels,
faux-Vuitton handbags, and hoicked-up bosoms. They flick their highlighted
hair hither, thither, and rat-a-tat-tat their false nails on the counter,
trying to catch the barman's eye.

They are, of course, faking it, like latter-day sirens, bewitching the
unwitting, when underneath the layers of St Tropez and Sun-In they are
pale-skinned brunettes, 5ft 5in in their bare feet, flat-chested and
stubby-nailed. Our infatuation with the fake is a puzzling thing. Turn
left out of London's Baker Street station, and you'll see the long,
snaking queue for Madame Tussaud's. This is Britain's most popular tourist
attraction. Each year, some 2 million people shell out £20 to stroll about
the staggering array of waxworks. On a hot Monday afternoon it is swimming
with French schoolchildren. They hover, slightly nonplussed, before Ant
and Dec, and pace around Kylie Minogue, who is paused, mid-prowl across a
grand piano, her neat little derrière upturned towards the ceiling. And as
they stand, stock still, enraptured, it is hard to tell who are the real
people and who are the waxworks.

Unravelling the real from the fake is an activity that is also
occupying the thoughts of David Boyle. In his new book, Authenticity:
Brands, Fakes, Spin And The Lust For Real Life, Boyle embarks upon an
appraisal of the battle between the two. "Everywhere we look, there is a
barely recorded struggle happening between real and artificial," he
writes. "[But] far from experiencing the last twitches of the real world,
I believe this struggle may be a clue to the way the future is going to
be."

Accordingly, he treks to Ocean Dome in Japan, where, within spitting
distance of the Pacific ocean, a company named Phoenix Resorts has spent
$1bn constructing an enclosed artificial resort, complete with 13,500
tonnes of water, a white-pebbled beach, and the strains of Swing Low
(Sweet Chariot) piped through a speaker system. After a good hour spent
writing postcards and wandering around the replica volcano and the
artificial palm trees in garish orange swimming shorts, Boyle folds his
towel and heads back to the "real sunshine" outside. He has been somewhat
bolstered by his experience. "If you look around today," he tells us,
"despite Ocean Dome and McDonald's and Microsoft, the real world has been
fighting back."

I picture Boyle, smiling brilliantly, triumphant in the face of all
this fakery, and I feel a little sad. I don't know that we are fighting
back at all; I fear our connection to the real has, like some great
umbilical cord, been cut. In the foreword to Authenticity, Boyle heaves
out a quote from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: "Primroses and
landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A
love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love
of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of
nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For, of course, it was
essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they
hated it... "

Boyle quotes the passage exultantly, as an example of a world that will
only ever exist within the confines of literary fantasy; after all, who
could ever conceive that we might abolish the love of nature?

Dr Alan Hirsch phones me from the airport. He has one of those
deliciously twangy American accents you recognise from the movies, and it
carries across the crackling phone line and over the hum of distant
travellers milling about behind him. Hirsch is the managing director of
the Smell And Taste Treatment And Research Foundation in Chicago. In
September 1991, he interviewed nearly 1,000 men and women chosen at random
in Chicago, asking which odours they found inspired feelings of nostalgia.
Hirsch discovered that those interviewees born before 1930 cited mainly
natural smells, such as pine, hay, horses and meadows. Meanwhile, those
born after 1930 were more likely to mention artificial smells, such as
marker pens, Play Dough and baby powder. Hirsch also found that while
those born before 1960 liked the smell of freshly cut grass, those born
between 1960 and 1979 actively disliked it, associating it with the
"unpleasant necessity of mowing the lawn".

In a separate investigation, Hirsch tested 20,000 people to see whether
they preferred the smell of real or artificial leather. "An overwhelming
proportion preferred the smell of the artificial," he says. "So, in the US
now, leather seats in cars are impregnated with the smell of artificial
leather." I laugh at the preposterousness of the idea, but Hirsch has
hardly begun: "Grape juice doesn't smell of grapes, and people prefer
that. Flower shops are scented to smell of flowers. Even scent-free soap
is scented."

The list goes on: Hirsch tells me how perfumiers often add a smell akin
to baby powder to their scents, to evoke a sense of nostalgia in potential
buyers. How supermarkets bump up the sales of their bakery goods by
releasing the smell of newly baked bread into the store, how cinema foyers
are scented with the smell of fresh popcorn, and cookie stalls ensure that
the air around them is perpetually laced with the sweet scent of chocolate
chip cookies. In the US, he says, the lingerie chain Victoria's Secret
employs a special kind of floral pot pourri throughout all its stores to
give a uniform, instantly recognisable scent to the brand. Even artificial
plants are being put in parks, because it is too costly to maintain real
ones. "Artificial," Hirsch concludes, "is now the norm and is the
expected.

"I would predict that we are only at the start of it," he says, a
mixture of trepidation and excitement in his voice. "It will increase as
we develop the capacity to produce certain aromas and non-real foods.
We're just on the threshold of all these things happening. The artificial
will replace the real, because we as a culture have grown to endorse it."

But we will lose something in the process. As we continue to endorse
the artificial over the real, those primroses and landscapes of Huxley's
Brave New World will grow increasingly gratuitous. "We lose this
connection with nature," concedes Hirsch, "which may perhaps affect the
environmental movement. Who cares about the natural world when people are
nostalgic for the synthetic?"

What is this "real" we will be so unceremoniously ditching? Is it
"real" free-range eggs and organic cauliflower, proper ale and the smell
of manure? Is it dirt under your nails, the great outdoors and life
without the constant blinking distraction of the television screen? As
professor of media and culture at Syracuse University and former president
of the National Popular Culture Association, Robert Thompson is perhaps
better placed than most to define what we mean when we describe something
as real.

"When the 20th-century naturalist novelists and playwrights had this
idea of wanting to be more 'real' they included dirty cups and saucers on
stage to communicate that texture of daily life," Thompson says. "In 1971,
when US TV decided it wanted to 'get real' with the series All In The
Family, the character of Archie Bunker would go to the bathroom and you'd
hear the flush. People had never seen that on television before."

Even on our screens today, EastEnders is credited for its "gritty
realism", though one could easily speculate that plotlines such as a
notorious crim falling head-over-heels with an undercover policewoman, and
someone tumbling into a canal while looking for a condom, are a far cry
from most of our own humdrum experiences of reality. The real reason we
believe EastEnders to be more realistic than, say, Neighbours, is because
EastEnders is miserable as sin: an endless procession of squally-mouthed
characters trudging through their sludge-coloured lives in the dog-eared
environs of Albert Square.

"To many people, 'real' means the street and dirty dishes," says
Thompson. "But these things are no more real than a tidy house and
sparkling plates. It's because for so long we associated those things with
the superficial world of novels and how things were portrayed on TV in the
1950s. We view the gritty, heartbreaking scenes as real because they are
so different from the utopian ideal."

In theory, reality TV, with its fly-on-the-wall cameras and its bona
fide actual people, ought to grant us an unfettered view of real life.
But, of course, its execution is a little more calculated than the name
implies. "Reality TV is really a terrible name for it," agrees Thompson.
"On one level, it's every bit as artificial as everything else - the whole
thing is contrived. But," and here his voice grows a little hopeful, "what
you pour in is people without scripts, and what results then is something
closer to reality. You've left these cracks into which reality can seep.
In the case of reality dating shows, you get to see all the ugly, stupid,
inarticulate behaviour you never get to see Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan do,
except in the most charming of ways." I can hear him, smiling down the
line at the thought, presumably, of Sleepless In Seattle.

Ah, Meg Ryan. Ryan, as anyone who has ever seen When Harry Met Sally
will assure you, is the queen of faking it. As you read this, thousands of
women are making like Meg, emitting a sound like a hurdy-gurdy because
that's how we feel orgasming should be done. It's like a form of sexual
karaoke, with a tune more popular, even, than I Will Survive.

When Cosmopolitan magazine was launched in 1972, in a flurry of
relentless chatter about fabulous sex and sure-fire tips to
earth-shattering orgasms, it was seen as an example of women's new sexual
liberation. However, 31 years later, a survey commissioned by Ann Summers
found that 80% of women regularly fake orgasm. Previously, one has to
wonder whether women would have even bothered faking it. Now we fake it
for the benefit of our feckless sexual partners, and, crucially, we fake
it for ourselves, because we feel that it's what we should be doing. If
all else fails, the Worst Case Scenario Handbook even offers a series of
foolproof steps to faking an orgasm, including such sage advice as, "You
may say your partner's name over and over. Many people, in the thralls of
ecstasy, will blurt out sentences or requests that are utterly
incomprehensible: try this occasionally."

When multimillion-selling rap artists, resplendent in floor-length
chinchilla, umpteen gold medallions and diamonds on every finger, claim to
be "keeping it real" what, precisely, do they mean? "What they are
saying," explains Thompson, "is that 'here you are going to get the raw
truth, sex, bad language, violence. This is where the rubber soles of your
Nikes hit the street.' Because rap lyrics and videos have a documentary
quality, they're 'real'. But of course," he admits, "it is no more real
than a Britney Spears record."

"I'm Real," purred Jennifer Lopez, recently. Jenny presumably retains
her "real" credentials because she is (a) from "the block" and (b) in
possession of a proudly large posterior. Yet there are some things about
Jenny that aren't so real: I know, for reasons that disturb me, precisely
which fake tan she uses, which foot cream, which styling products smooth
those treacle-coloured locks. I've seen pictures of her, back in the early
days, when she was a pallid brunette with unkempt brows.

Of course, the cosmetic industry was never about reality. Over the
years, we have performed the most ridiculous rituals in the name of beauty
- powdering our faces with lead, for example, crayoning on fake beauty
spots, and lacquering toenails startling shades of scarlet. But there was
a time when one at least used to pretend that the collar and cuffs were
matching. Nowadays, most women wear their blatantly dyed locks as a sign
of status. We are caramel one season, mahogany the next, anxiously
inspecting our roots to check whether our natural colour is creeping back,
like mould. "Hair colour has become an essential part of a woman's beauty
routine, to the extent that hair without colour is like a face without
make-up," declares hair colour doyen Daniel Galvin.

And in truth, I am always vaguely surprised when I meet a woman who
doesn't colour her hair. The ridiculousness of this does not escape me,
nor does the stupidity of the fact that I myself have brown hair, which I
dye brown. It is, of course, my firm belief that I am dyeing it a superior
shade of brown. Galvin explains, "We colour hair to make it even more
beautiful than nature intended."

In the 1920s and 1930s, hair dye was limited to henna, with the
resulting colour an unapologetic shade of red. Consequently, dyeing one's
hair was deemed to be the behaviour of a harlot. When Galvin began working
in salons in the 1960s, he found that only about 10% of women would have
their hair coloured, and even then it was largely with the intention of
covering grey hair. "I realised then," he says, "that there was a lot of
potential for hair colour." He began by using solid blocks of tint, but by
the 1970s had progressed to highlights and outlandish, unnatural shades.
Today, Galvin says, hair colouring is the number one request in salons.

We are almost as averse to seeing our skin in its natural shade. For
all the much-touted pale skin pioneers, such as Nicole Kidman, Cate
Blanchett and Erin O'Connor, the majority of white women still crave the
Californian sunkissed look. Given that we live in the UK, and that our
national skin colour appears to be an unappealing shade of porridge,
faking tans is the logical answer. Tanning salons consequently remain
popular, despite continued health warnings that suggest usage might be
linked to skin cancer. In a recent study commissioned by Au Courant fake
tan, 2,000 women aged 16-65 were asked about their attitudes to tanned
skin. More than three-quarters felt a tan was important, making them feel
more attractive and more confident. A little less than half admitted using
fake tan products. Around the globe, meanwhile, a bottle of St Tropez fake
tan sells every 10 seconds.

We still want the effect to be real. Few of us wish to look as if we
have been a regular at the tanning salon, have had our teeth whitened, or
had nips and tucks. Take Mary Archer, for example, who wanted her cosmetic
surgery to look as though she hadn't had surgery at all. Even Cate
Blanchett is said to use a product called SK-II Deep Whitening Clarifying
Radiance Emulsion, which makes skin paler. All of us are faking it, to
some extent, and as a result there exists between women an unspoken
contract of fakeness.

One fake beauty trend which has slipped furtively across the Atlantic
is false nails. Once deemed unfailingly naff, they have now acquired a
curious respectability. The longer and more talon-like one wears them, the
more kudos one can expect to receive (although, admittedly, the less one
can be expected physically to achieve with one's hands). Over the past
decade, the number of nail salons across the US has increased by 374%. The
industry now represents $6.4bn and employs 300,000 people.

Likewise, between 1997 and 2002, the number of cosmetic procedures
carried out in the US more than doubled, according to the American Society
for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. In 2002 alone, almost 6.9m procedures were
performed, the top five being liposuction (372,831), breast augmentation
(249,641), eyelid surgery (229,092), nose reshaping (156,973) and breast
reduction (125,614). On top of these came non-surgical procedures such as
Botox, collagen injection and chemical peels.

Apostolos Gaitanas, a specialist cosmetic plastic surgeon based in
London, has also noticed a steady increase in demand for cosmetic surgery
on these shores, estimating a rise of 10%-20% each year. One of his most
popular procedures remains breast augmentation, which costs between £3,700
and £4,200, depending on the size. "Most girls are wanting a large C to a
small D," he says. "It takes about an hour, and they spend the night in
hospital."

We are, says Thompson, "churning out fake repros of the human body,
just like we did with the model T Ford." He recalls the advent of mass
production, the cars flowing off assembly lines, and the introduction of
the Levitt-town suburbs, where, "one model house was produced many times
over, in contrast to former notions of architecture, which was all about
building a single building with a name. Now you had this notion that this
stuff was totally anonymous." Thompson's comparison rings eerily true. It
seems the cosmetic assembly lines of the west are manufacturing batch
after newly pressed batch of identical blond, buxom, snake-hipped and
trout-pouted women.

"Plato would have absolutely loved it," Thompson laughs. "He had the
idea that out there in the heavens there was the perfect example of, say,
the apple, and that every apple on earth was an imperfect copy of that
apple. But now technology is allowing us to enter Plato's heaven."

The antithesis of cosmetic surgery is arguably self-harm. Figures from
the Mental Health Foundation show rates of self-harm admissions have
increased dramatically in the UK over the past 20 years. As many as one in
10 young people deliberately self-harm, and the number of admissions of
young men harming themselves has almost doubled since the 1980s. In
Welcome To The Desert Of The Real, Slavoj Zizek argues that self-harm, or
cutting, "represents a desperate strategy to return to the real of the
body... Far from being suicidal, far from indicating a desire for
self-annihilation, cutting is a radical attempt to (re)gain a hold on
reality." Certainly, the most potent image of self-harm is the photograph
of Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers, who had, into the flesh
of his own forearm, carved the words "4 Real".

It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish the cosmetically enhanced
individual from the real McCoy - after all, not all women with boob jobs
look like Jordan; not all women with the genuine article are kind enough,
like Jodie Marsh, to provide the relevant signage. A similar problem faces
the grocery shopper. "Most processed foods contain flavourings, they're a
ubiquitous ingredient," says Ian Tokelove, a spokesman for the Food
Commission, "but people often don't realise how widely they are used,
because they're not listed on the packaging."

In fact, there are 5,000 different types of flavour compound, falling
into a variety of different categories: if your strawberry yogurt is
labelled "natural strawberry flavour", it means it came from an actual
strawberry. If it is labelled "natural flavouring", it means it came from
a natural source - quite feasibly wood, which is a popular source of
flavourings, and far cheaper than strawberries. Anything labelled
"artificial flavouring" is obviously synthetic, and anything labelled
"nature identical" is also synthetic, but even under a microscope you
couldn't differentiate between that and the natural flavouring it mimics.

"Our big argument [against this] is that they're replacing real food
with nutrition-free chemicals," says Tokelove. "Kids today are exposed to
artificial ingredients from the start. A real banana tastes nothing like
an artificial banana taste. But the artificial taste is stronger." And if,
perhaps, you have been exposed to artificial banana for the majority of
your young life, when you finally eat an actual banana it may come as
something of a disappointment. It's less sweet, for starters, and
secondly, it doesn't taste so intensely banana-y. Artificial flavours just
taste louder, and more powerful.

"This whole era of fake has taken away the power of the original," says
Thompson, in the tone of a man who doesn't believe this to be an
altogether bad thing. "You could take the Mona Lisa and, relatively
cheaply, reproduce it so the only people who would know the difference
would be art experts. Why not," he suggests excitedly, "have a museum of
fake art in every city?"

Earlier this summer, Tom Morton co-curated Bootleg, an art show at
London's Spitalfields market. It showcased works by artists such as Cerith
Wyn Evans, who displayed a pencil portrait of himself, drawn by a
Leicester Square street artist, and Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, who
showed a bootleg of a bootleg - a recreation of the early 1980s Cramps
psychiatric hospital gig that has been circulating as a bootleg for years.

"The show's title was chosen for a number of reasons," says Morton. "I
wanted it to speak of devalued things, like fake Louis Vuitton handbags,
or the dodgy 'Rembrandts' in the dark halls of every minor English stately
home, and things that are special precisely because they are bootlegs,
like the illegal recordings of Smiths concerts available at Camden market.
I also wanted to speak of the action of faking something - bootlegging. It
seems to me that this action of faking has a political content." Morton is
taking a swipe at that ol' bugbear, global capitalism. "At a time when
western companies are aggressively pursuing consumers in developing
nations, while taking advantage of these countries' cheap workforces, the
production and purchase of fakes can be seen as a political act," he
concludes, with a flourish.

Another jubilant faker is Eddy Temple-Morris who, along with fellow DJ
James Hyman, presents The Remix on London's Xfm radio station. The show
specialises in bootlegs, the fusing of two seemingly unrelated records to
create a glorious hybrid. Perhaps the most well-known example was the
bootleg that married Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head with New Order's
Blue Monday. Kylie herself performed this genetic mutation at last year's
Brit Awards.

"If you buy a fake handbag or a fake CD or DVD, it's clear and obvious
that the original is going to be better," says Temple-Morris, who,
incidentally, has a voice like an exuberant golden retriever. "But if you
listen to our show, that's not the case - a record can be much better than
the sum of its parts." He cites Freelance Hellraiser's A Stroke Of Genius
- Christina Aguilera vs The Strokes, as a prime example. "The fact is it's
loads better than Aguilera who provides the vocals, and even loads better
than those New York trustafarians The Strokes." The next one to listen out
for, he advises, is Ray Of God, which melds Madonna and the Sex Pistols.
"It's only two minutes, and it totally captures the energy of punk. It's
actually had the thumbs up from both Madonna and John Lydon." The big
record companies are irked by this behaviour but Temple-Morris is
unrepentant. "It's outshining stuff that record companies are spending
thousands of pounds on," he says gleefully. "It's power to the people!"

They started the show three years ago. Now, they are inundated,
receiving nigh-on 200 bootlegs a week. They delight in their
non-hierarchical attitude to the mixes they play. "We'll play something a
15-year-old called Podgemaster, who's been listening to the show since he
was 12, has made in his bedroom, followed by something Fatboy Slim has
made in his slightly bigger bedroom in Brighton," he chirrups.

Does he think of the records as fakes? "No," he says instinctively, and
then pauses. "It's like a kid is just a genetic mix of two parents. And in
many cases, the child outshines the parents." Perhaps the only way to
accomplish the real is to unapologetically fake it.

"One could argue that US popular culture plays an important role in
popular culture around the world," says Thompson. "One could also argue
that US culture is characterised by its artificiality... that the entire
New World settlement was, from the beginning, a blurred copy of the world
it left behind. From the beginning the New World revelled in the invented,
the fake, the synthetic. The urge to annihilate history and reinvent self
has given rise to a society of the simulacrum."

Arguably, this "society of the simulacrum" has been forged largely by
capitalism's agenda to increase our desire to consume. The more these
fakeries are marketed as necessary to our lives, the more we will spend to
acquire and uphold them. So one might envisage that there might be,
entwined with the surge of anticapitalist and indeed anti-American
feeling, a movement against the fake; a resurgence of the real.

Certainly Boyle would argue that this is the case, citing as evidence
the thirst for "natural" and ethically sound products, our increased
desire to experience "authentic" tourism and the growth of the organic
food movement. In 2001/02, UK organic food sales reached £920m - a 15%
increase on the previous year. In the same period, the area of fully
organic land in the UK increased by 91% from 240,000 hectares to 458,600
hectares. The real will rise again, shouts Boyle and, as a rallying call
to arms against the artificial regime, he quotes John Betjeman's 1937
poem, Slough:

Come, bombs, and blow to smithereens
Those
air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat,
tinned milk, tinned beans
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Zizek, the social and philosophical commentator, would perhaps find
this an apt quotation. He argues that, like self-harmers, a desire for
reality manifests through a violent action. "Is not so-called
fundamentalist terror also an expression of the passion for the real?" he
asks. "Is not its goal also to awaken us, western citizens, from our
numbness, from immersion in our everyday ideological universe?" He cites
the attack on the World Trade Centre as the obvious example. He also
suggests, however, that such a dramatic, violent action results in
something of a paradox - the action is not in itself reality, so much as
providing a spectacle to draw attention to the real, or to quote Karlheinz
Stockhausen, "the greatest work of art ever".

One could even argue that the seeming return to the real in the
increased passion for organic produce and natural foods is itself mere
artifice. Perhaps it is just another way of making us buy things, the
latest trick up the sleeve of capitalism, the words "organic" and
"natural" placed, like dirty saucers, to make us feel as if we are getting
the real.

With the majority of us born after 1930, we are of a generation weened
on a diet of synthetic smells, tastes and colours. We have a dwindling
connection with nature. The seasons pass us by in one long centrally
heated, air-conditioned, unseasonally stocked blur. Even our experience of
war is not guts and gore, but viewed on the small screen, with fancy
graphics and fuzzy-edged news reports.

We expect to view life permanently in Technicolor and, when faced with
the murky hues of reality, we cushion our disappointment with Prozac,
psychoanalysis, talkshows. We have grown accustomed to the bountiful
factory assembly lines, to the advertising hoardings and magazine spreads
showing airbrushed fantasy homes, holidays, women. Our expectations of how
life should be are bigger, brighter, bolder than reality could ever hope
to be.

But is this necessarily such a bad thing? We've got strawberries that
taste more strawberryish than the real thing; we've got bosoms that don't
jiggle when we run for buses; we've got hair like Rapunzel, tans like
Barbie, and records that supersede the songs they bastardise. Perhaps this
is just a new era, a bootleg of the real, outshining its parents; perhaps,
after all, this is a brave new world.

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