Driving an hour from my east London home, I arrive in Brentwood, Essex, to a high street littered with ‘boutiques’ selling row after row of tight dresses. Capitalising on an upsurge of tourism created by the reality TV show The Only Way is Essex (TOWIE), the shops, owned by the cast members themselves, wouldn’t look out of place in a nostalgic seaside town. The signs are brightly coloured square logos on white backgrounds, made all the more garish by their contrast to the mass of grey concrete that makes up the rest of the high street.
I suppose I ought to issue a disclaimer here: by ‘Essex’, I am referring to the small part of the large and beautiful county represented by TOWIE. I am acutely aware that the culture of this community of young revellers is by no means exclusive to this part of the world – it can be found in most big towns around the country; in fact, it is relatively mainstream. Nor is the contained culture of this specific group of people living in Brentwood indicative of the entire county. Far from it; Essex is a rich and diverse county, within which the TOWIE gang represent a tiny population. Regardless, when I refer to this subculture as Essex, you know what I mean.
The TOWIE (henceforth referred to as Essex) subculture is associated with extreme consumption and celebrity aspiration, where investment in personal appearance is directly correlated with social and professional success, and access to the trappings of wealth and tabloid fame – expensive cars, champagne, glamorous VIP nightclubs and huge houses – are available to all. The hyperbole around the community created by the TOWIE phenomenon was calling to me, and I wanted to see how close to reality this reality TV show really was.
Frantically sending pictures of myself from the dressing room to my friends – ‘Is this tight enough?’, ‘Bright enough?’, ‘Revealing enough?’ – my Essex experience begins with an early-morning quest to prepare my wardrobe for the weekend. I settle on a figure-hugging blue number, complete with diamanté clusters across the straps, and an outrageous pair of white skyscraper heels that I will have no chance of being able to walk in.
Feeling pleased with my ensemble, I head to a beauty salon for my first experience of fake tanning. My nose tingles with the smell of warm hair and chemicals as I descend the staircase for the tanning studio in the bowels of the building. The beautician pulls on a pair of rubber gloves, her drawn-on eyebrows making her look like an evil air hostess.
‘Hello,’ I say.
Shooting me a rather unfriendly look, she nods in acknowledgement. ‘How dark do you want to go, then?’
‘As dark as possible,’ I reply confidently.
She looks taken aback. ‘I have never been asked for that before.’ She pauses to think. ‘Like dark-dark?’
‘Er… yes… I think so… dark-dark,’ I reply, a little less confidently.
‘I’ll have to do three separate coats then,’ she says with a resigned sigh. ‘If you strip down and put those paper pants on, I’ll come back in a couple of minutes.’
I begin disrobing, a little uncomfortable at the indignity of the paper pants, before the beautician re-enters and sets about positioning me like a plasticine Morph figure. I end up in the shape of a goalkeeper, my hands and arms away from my body in an awkward squat position while she sprays a fine mist of icy liquid all over my body. The cold takes my breath away.
Twenty minutes and three coats later, and my arms are aching. ‘OK, you’re done,’ she says finally. I breathe a sigh of relief and lower my arms, excited by the prospect of warm clothes. ‘Oh no,’ she says, positioning a large fan to blow straight onto my body, ‘you have to stay in that position for another ten minutes while you dry.’
For fuck’s sake.
Still shivering and wondering if it’s possible to get frostbite on my nipples, I distract myself by calling a salon owned by Amy Childs, one of the major characters in TOWIE, to make another appointment.
‘Can you fit in four vajazzles tomorrow morning?’ I try to keep my voice low as I walk down the street.
‘Yep, that’s fine,’ says the receptionist. ‘You’re all booked in for eleven a.m.’
When I finally get back to my hotel, I put on the lightest clothes I can find to avoid rubbing all my fake tan off before it has the chance to develop, and spend the next few hours with the heating up on full whack, watching back-to-back episodes of TOWIE on my laptop.
Nestled in the twilight zone between the real and not real, the conversations don’t seem too scripted but the situations the cast find themselves in do stretch the concept of ‘reality’ a little further than my usual interactions with friends. Or perhaps my group of girls are just a bit boring and could do with more drama in our lives. The vast majority of the episodes focus on the dizzyingly complex relationships between the cast members, the gossip surrounding those, and a LOT of preening and partying.
I rack up five hours of research before pouring a warm bath. Easing myself into the water, I make the sound of an old man getting up from a chair and sit there for twenty minutes, the bath water turning a disturbing shade of brown around me. When I finally emerge from what any onlooker would presume to be a tub of Bisto, the mirror above the sink confirms that I still belong in the company of Willy Wonka. I pour myself a big glass of wine.
An hour later Moira, Sian and Jo – my best friends and allies for the weekend – make their entrance, interrupting yet another episode of TOWIE, and spend about ten minutes laughing hysterically at my face. By now it is 5 p.m. and time for us to begin our evening preparations for a night on the town. I start by attempting to attach a handful of cheap hair extensions I had ordered from the internet onto my head. Sian lets me spend a while becoming hopelessly entangled in the nylon hair before deciding to rescue me. She clips each clump of hair underneath my real hair in layers, and it becomes increasingly evident that my real hair is about forty-seven shades lighter than the extensions I had bought.
We stare at each other for a moment. ‘Maybe they’ll look a bit better if you cut them?’ she says, unconvincingly.
‘What kind of scissors do you want?’ the receptionist asks me after an embarrassing lift ride with two businessmen.
I point at my blatantly ridiculous hair, ‘Errr…’
She nods sympathetically, handing me the only pair she has in her drawer.
Unsurprisingly, even after a brutal attack with the scissors, I still look ludicrous and decide to abort the mission, unclipping the tatty party-shop pieces of hair one by one, wishing I had pushed the boat out a bit here and gone more upmarket with my choice of extensions.
I decide to move on to make-up, something I’m a little more comfortable with, applying layers of foundation, bronzer and blusher. Already looking like I’ve been lost at sea for a month, I turn to Moira. ‘More blusher?’
‘Definitely,’ she says. ‘More is more!’
I apply another layer to my face, which seems to have gained half an inch of protrusion.
Next the eyelashes.
‘Er… which way round do they go?’ I ask Sian, shaking a finger they appear to be already stuck to.
Sian loses her patience. ‘I think you presume we’ve all read a book about this stuff,’ she says, ‘but it’s just common sense!’
Is it? Should I have been born with an innate knowledge of how to attach different types of artificial hair to myself? I don’t know how to put fake eyelashes on, I don’t know how to put hair extensions in, I am crap at doing make-up, crap at doing my hair and I can’t walk in high heels. I wonder why my friends seem to be so much better at these things than me, why it comes so naturally to them.
I go back to the eyelashes and pick up the box, discovering the very clear instructions printed on the back for how to attach them. What an idiot. Of course, I could have just looked at the box, why didn’t I think of that? Perhaps I am somehow proud that I don’t know these things, placing personal value on a more natural look and therefore thinking badly of anyone who doesn’t. I cringe at the thought. Could my whining and moaning to Sian just be an attempt at drawing attention to the fact that I consider myself to be above this level of preening, like some kind of judgy badge of honour? Or is this reaction a manifestation of my always feeling like an outsider in these moments of girly camaraderie? I was often called a ‘tomboy’ growing up – choosing to wear combat trousers over dresses and never releasing my hair from its pulled-back ponytail – so I guess it might just be both.
To add to my shaky sense of femininity, I am informed that I am not allowed to wear the blue dress I bought earlier that day. ‘It’s more Southend-on-Sea than TOWIE,’ Sian explains. ‘People will think you’re taking the piss.’
I am a bit upset by this, I think because I wanted to look silly, and probably was just seeing this all as a big joke. But if I am going to really experience this world, I need to keep these feelings in check, and stop being such a twat. I resign myself to yanking my body into a red figure-hugging dress of Sian’s, which actually looks quite nice.
We hail a taxi to Sugar Hut, a popular nightclub owned and frequented by TOWIE cast members, teeter past the bouncers in our skyscraper heels and have our photo taken by the official photographer, doing the standard hand-on-hip-and-looking-back-over-the-shoulder pose.
I look around at my fellow revellers – nearly every other girl here is wearing fake eyelashes, fake tan, fake hair, skyscraper heels and a body-con dress, some so tight you can see when they last had a wax – and I start to feel a bit angry, as if this might be a feminist issue. Why should we women have to go to all of this effort? Spending three hours adjusting our appearances so we can all look as close as possible to a carbon copy of Cheryl Cole? Rubbing out our imperfections, rubbing out our identity, so we all look the same: the same big, curly, thick hair, the same spray tans, the same smoky eyes, the same dramatic eyelashes. Then I take another look around the room and realise that a lot of the men in here have done exactly the same – most have plucked, waxed or threaded their eyebrows, have clearly done as many coats of fake tan as I have, and wear tight, low-cut t-shirts revealing painstakingly toned bodies. It makes me feel a bit better.
One guy pushes in next to me at the bar. He is wearing a crisp grey suit, a white shirt with a thin black tie and a V-neck peach cashmere jumper. He looks immaculate, like a ‘Ken does preppy’ doll. ‘Ahhhh, you look so sweet,’ the words fall out of my patronising mouth before I engage my brain. I grimace, waiting for the tirade of abuse I deserve in return.
‘Thanks, hon. You look really nice too,’ he says, revealing a genuine smile that floods me with guilt.
He is no exception; everybody we meet here seems to be exceedingly friendly. The atmosphere is welcoming, and my discomfort eases with every accepting smile. Suddenly, the bartender jumps up onto the bar and leans towards me.
‘Babe – am I coming detached at the edge?’ she asks.
‘Er… what?’ I have absolutely no idea what she is talking about.
She points to the edge of her eye. ‘My eyelash, is it coming off?’
‘Oh, no, you’re fine,’ I say, feeling a glowing pride that she trusted me with this girly question. Maybe this feeling of belonging is what I have been missing all along. Maybe I haven’t felt like I belong in this world because I have been fighting my transformation to enter it on its own terms.
We somehow manage to blag our way into the VIP section, where I have a stunted but relatively polite conversation with one of the TOWIE cast – I’m not sure if she is being purposefully nonchalant or just struggling to move her face due to overenthusiastic use of Botox – before joining another reality TV celebrity for a dance on the sofas. I decide to sneak a glass of Grey Goose vodka from one of their tables and the rest of the night disappears into a black hole. At this rate, I may have to save chapter R for Rehab.
The next morning, wearing dark glasses and clutching a bottle of water, I join the girls for the painfully long two-day (ten-minute) schlep to Amy Childs’ beauty salon. Our bubbly beautician welcomes us with an enthusiasm that creates a small volcano in my head.
‘Is Amy here?’ I ask her, through a mouth drier than the Simpson Desert.
‘No,’ she says, smoothing down her bright pink apron. ‘She’s in her shop today, but you gotta go see her after. She’ll love you girls coz you’re pretty!’
She realises what she has just said. ‘… Not that she only likes pretty girls.’
‘She just likes them more?’ Sian offers.
She laughs. ‘Exactly!’
With that, she leans over Moira, who is lying horizontally on a treatment table, looking as if she is about to undergo a serious operation. She is. Moira is about to be vajazzled.
A type of body jewellery made famous by TOWIE, a vajazzle involves attaching small stick-on diamanté crystals around your pubic region, typically around and under the bikini line, to bedazzle the area up.
We had been given two vajazzle options: the initials ‘A. C.’ (Amy Childs), and the one we all ended up choosing, ‘Well Jel’. One of the TOWIE catchphrases, ‘Well Jel’ means ‘well jealous’, and is used to express an aspiration, to convey envy and also as a kind of compliment in response to an achievement. We each take turns lying on the beautician’s bench while she applies the £20 transfer. Although the options are limited, and extremely tame when compared to the elaborate vajazzles Google had promised us, we all decide that having another girl’s initials on our vajayjays would be a bit too weird.
The remainder of our day is spent trying to replicate a day in the life of an Essex girl, indulging in an extended getting-ready routine for another night out in Sugar Hut. It starts with a blow-dry at a hair salon. ‘Big is best’ in Essex, and apparently, we all want our hair to be in thick, cascading curls. I feel like I am back at Crufts as my hairdresser backcombs and plumps up my hair for over an hour. I take the opportunity to quiz her about what it means to be an Essex girl.
Up until now, I haven’t had to prepare questions when I am interviewing people for this book; I am so interested in their lives that they just spill out of me, resulting in some unplanned interviews lasting for hours. But today I find myself wishing I had done a little more preparation as I struggle to find an access point.
‘What do you like about living in Essex?’ I try.
‘People are very friendly, like one big family, and everyone looks nice here. Everyone makes an effort.’
‘Some come in here to get their hair done every weekend,’ she continues, ‘or they just come in for a blow-dry when they’ve got a night out. For some of them, I think it’s just an excuse to sit down and have a bit of a gossip.’
I reflect on this. I have never liked chatting at the hairdresser’s. I always sit there feeling self-conscious and worrying that I am not saying the right thing or behaving in the right way, that I somehow don’t belong. My obsession with fitting in and being liked seems to be at its most challenged here, and I wonder what this says about me. I can see how the hairdresser’s chair might be a safe space for a lot of women, a place to discuss things that they wouldn’t usually open up about, an excuse to have a gossip and a giggle in a world that is usually so damn heavy. I wonder again if this just means I am an awful snob who considers herself above gossip, or if it’s actually another case of feeling like I am not part of this club, of not feeling like I belong in this particular version of life as a woman.
After another hour of chatting and coiffing, we leave the salon looking like dolls with oversized heads, and wander over to visit Amy Childs, who is holding court in her boutique across the high street.
We find her in the corner of her white-walled high-street palace, on a silver and purple throne befitting the undisputed Queen of Brentwood.
‘All right girls!’ she says to us as we walk over.
‘We thought we would come over and show you our vajazzles,’ I say to her, pulling down the front of my trousers to reveal the top line of the gems. Sian, Moira and Jo do the same, and we all giggle like schoolgirls.
Amy looks impressed. ‘I ain’t never had four girls show me their vajazzles before!’ she says, pulling out her smartphone. ‘I’m gonna tweet about this later.’
You know that feeling when you walk along the road, shoulders back, boobs out, acutely aware of how incredible you look? Well, I feel absolutely nothing like that when, after another three-hour preening session, we head back to Sugar Hut later that evening. Instead I feel self-conscious and depressingly sober. But I know that so many of the girls around me do feel incredible walking into Sugar Hut, that this is the raison d’être of all that preening, and I desperately want to feel part of this. I think I know where to find it and head straight for the club bathroom to be greeted by a sea of girls applying make-up and reattaching eyelashes.
‘Do you wanna borrow some blusher, babe?’ the girl next to me at the mirror asks. I take that as a hint that I am looking a bit pale and trowel on another layer. My face is now so far beyond its usual prominence, I calculate that there would be a thirteen-second delay between being punched in the face and feeling the physical impact.
I look around me at the girls helping each other to get ready, chatting in the stalls as they take it in turns to use the loo, laughing and sharing tips with each other, and I think I am finally starting to get it. The energy in here is so positive.
Back at the bar I talk to Barry, a self-proclaimed Essex lad born in Brentwood.
‘Do you prefer the girls when they’re glammed up?’ I ask him, marvelling at his meticulously groomed appearance.
‘Not really. I prefer them more natural-looking,’ he says. ‘But I don’t think any of it is for the guys. All of the glam is for the other girls, a competitive thing between each other. That’s the only way I can explain it, because most guys prefer them to look more natural.’
I reflect on this and wonder if there is any truth in the statement that this level of preening is a competitive thing. Are people here putting in all of this effort to look nice or are they doing it to fit in because the bar of what is acceptable has been raised? As soon as one girl puts fake eyelashes on, the rest of the girls in the room look like they have short and underwhelming eyelashes, so they all need to wear them to reset the playing field. It’s like an arms race. If one girl gets fake boobs, the other girls have to get them to stay competitive. If one older woman defies wrinkles with a Botox injection, other wrinkly women of that age are at a disadvantage. And where does it all end?
By the end of the night, I am fed up and ready to go home. I can’t walk in my shoes, my feet are in agony, and I want to tear my eyelashes off. I am still struggling to work out why I am so annoyed by all of this preening. I do enjoy looking pretty, but right now I just don’t feel pretty at all. For me, the joy of make-up is to make it seem as if you naturally look that way. The joy is the lie – I have no blemishes, and my eyes are naturally this defined, honestly – but there is no lying with this amount of make-up; it’s blatantly obvious how much of an effort I have put in to look like this.
But I have to remember that this is just the way I view make-up, when the joy for many is not the lie; the joy is in the glamour, and the amazing transformation that make-up and fake eyelashes can facilitate, and who the hell am I to pass judgement if this is your thing? Why do I embrace the absurdity of grown men dressing up in woollen britches and firing fake guns at each other, but rile against people who love to get glammed up? Especially because the transformation here is, in a way, accessing a fantasy world every bit as complete as the battle re-enactors. These girls are not just competitive: they are absolutely living their dreams of being Cheryl Cole, or any celebrity. They are dressing up, living their best lives and loving it. I also have to give them credit for being able to walk in these beautiful torture shoes and being nails enough to not even complain about how bloody painful they are. I yank the enormous heels from my feet as we climb into the taxi, wince at the pain of my weeping blisters and massage my aching heels. I will just never cut it as an Essex girl.