Needless fuss over using make-up to climb a mountain

Kitty Chrisp, The Independent

When I saw the picture of Amanda Holden at the top of Snowdon — pout on, walking sticks in the air, hip cocked as if poised for a Vogue photoshoot — I thought: go on, lass.

Climbing mountains is not easy. I do it much more than I’d like to, with a boyfriend who thinks he is a mountain goat. Every time I’m up there, rain lashing against my face, knees buckling, feeling like an adventure-struck hobbit dreaming of the Shire, I curse and shout: “What the hell am I doing here!” into the wind, which of course, responds with a slap in the face. It also doesn’t help that I get vertigo, either.

But while I am foolhardy enough to continue to climb mountains — feeling wholly unfit for purpose, without a reason for doing so other than a faint hope that maybe this time it won’t rain — Amanda Holden is doing this for charity. The fabulous beyond fabulous picture was taken on top of the second mountain in Amanda’s Three Peaks Challenge that she completed earlier today for Heart FM’s charity Global’s Make Some Noise. The challenge was to climb the highest mountains in England, Wales and Scotland within 24 hours. Quite an achievement. Well done, I’d say.

Yet it’s a shame that much of the reaction hasn’t said “well done” at all. Instead, much of it has obsessed over Amanda’s “full face of make-up” (as one paper put it), rather than celebrating her achievement. One headline claimed Amanda is now the “world’s sexiest hiker”. Eyebrows were raised on social media by the kind of people, I would hazard, who still care when women wear short skirts and mutter under their breath, “she’s asking for it, her” on spotting their someone’s daughter or sister or mum “out out” in their local town of 8,000 people. To me, this obsession with the thickness of Amanda Holden’s make-up smacks of just a different version of this thinking – another way of policing women’s bodies and how we present them to the world. Being a countryside girl myself, I am well acquainted with these attitudes. Since the age of 15, I have always worn a thick layer of Amy Winehouse-inspired winged liquid eyeliner. At one point it went the whole way around my eye, which, in hindsight, was not a good look. But you can imagine the response in rural Northumberland. When you wear what these countryside folk deem to be a “townie” amount of make-up, you’re automatically deemed ridiculous.

My make-up was only ever designed to help me feel more confident, more myself. The irony is that as soon as someone said, “you’ve got a lot of make-up on today”, they inadvertently stole this armour and used it as a weapon against me, leaving me feeling shy and awkward.

Now, of course, I don’t care anymore. I’m older and wiser (and admittedly, wear slightly less eye make-up). But I’d hate to think other young girls who love wearing make-up might see those headlines and think they don’t belong on mountains. Because as well as being an example of policing women’s bodies, the outrage at Amanda’s make-up mountain wear plays into the limited and reductive “girly girl” stereotype so many women have to fight against every day. Why the hell should Amanda Holden, the nation’s most famously glamorous fifty something, change who she is just because she is climbing a mountain? And why should anyone be forced to feel like a lesser version of themselves? Aside from the vertigo (a clear hindrance), I think in some ways the reason I don’t always enjoy climbing mountains is because I often don’t believe I can: I don’t feel confident that I belong there.

It’s up to all of us to convince girls — and grown women — that we can be anywhere. That climbing a mountain is hard, and to be celebrated, no matter what you’ve got on your face.