KEY POINTS:
The measure of all things stylish, Vogue magazine has decided that freckles are a good thing. Again. This type of wisdom is rolled out about once every eight years when someone writes something in a magazine about how "cool" freckles are - either shortly before, or after, a piece about how cool red hair is.
It's relevant to me, seeing as I am about as freckled as you can get: they are all over my face, arms, back and legs - in fact, anywhere that has seen the sun for more than five minutes.
"Freckles are sexy," Alex Bilmes writes in September's Vogue. "Freckles should be fetishised, embraced, touched, kissed. Freckles, more than anything, are a provocation: if I can see that some of you is freckled, I can't help wondering about the rest. If your face is freckled, what about your back, your stomach, thighs ... ?"
Yes, Alex, but I don't really want you to wonder what the rest of me looks like. It's not actually much fun being a walking invitation for people to ask questions such as: "Have you got freckles all over your boobs?" It really is astonishing how many people - of both sexes - think it's okay to ask me what exactly the skin on my bottom looks like. I kid you not.
It is all very well saying freckles are in Vogue, but for those of us stuck with them - either a sprinkling across the nose or, like the actress Lindsay Lohan, absolutely everywhere - it'll take a lot more than a magazine to make us freckled folk feel cutting edge.
I've been stared at (not usually admiringly) all my life. Comments range from the sublime to the ridiculous, but one of the most memorable was on a bus when a boy asked his father: "What is wrong with that lady? Why is she covered in spots?"
Freckles are caused by uneven clusters of melanin in the skin (which is what turns brown when it comes into contact with ultraviolet rays from the sun). People without freckles have an even distribution of melanin, so the skin goes brown evenly in the sunshine. You aren't born freckled, you acquire them as you spend time in the sun. Some fade, others are permanent.
There is a literary tradition of casting the one with freckles as the loser, or the baddie. In A Passage To India by E.M. Forster, Adela Quested is described as being unattractive because she is so "angular" and "freckled"; in creating Caliban, the deformed creature in The Tempest, Shakespeare chose to make him a "freckled whelp"; in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, the spooky Peter Quint has red hair and freckles.
When I meet someone who has as many as me, even I think they look weird. And I am suspicious of men who say they like them.
In Africa a witch doctor once inquired if I was cursed (if so, he knew an excellent exorcising ritual). My own grandmother once steered me into a chemist and pointed out a bleaching cream that would lighten my freckles. My own grandmother!
Julianne Moore, the freckled Hollywood actress, sums up the relationship most freckled people have with their skin: "I still don't like them, but I have other things to worry about. I care about it less."
So, thanks for the thought, Alex - but you're not fooling anyone.
- INDEPENDENT
