My latest CLEO article hit the newsstands this morning.

Beauty By Numbers

Believe you’re not attractive unless you’re blonde, big-boobed and immaculately spray-tanned like Heidi Montag? Rachel Hills investigates society’s cookie-cutter idea of beauty.

Published in CLEO, January 2009 issue.

Grandma Terri may have taken out the competition and Rory been your preferred piece of eye candy, but the most interesting contestant on the final season of Big Brother had to be Brigitte Stavaruk.

If you didn’t watch the show, Brigitte was sold as Australia’s answer to Paris Hilton, complete with long, bleach blonde hair extensions, a rich father and a stuffed unicorn named Princess Sparkle. She cited her greatest achievement as the day she purchased her breast augmentation and was quoted on the show’s website saying: “I don’t like thinking.” In short, she was the kind of girl people either loved or hated.

Queer Eye’s Carson Kressley loved her (“I think we were separated at birth!” he exclaimed when they met); I fell into the latter camp. Who was this girl who was being shoved down my throat as “the hot one” simply because she ticked a few boxes, and why were people so readily buying into it? More to the point: why did she have to act like such a “dumb blonde” cliché?

Step 1: Learn the formula

Of course, Brigitte isn’t the only person who thinks of blonde hair, big boobs, a tan and not a whole lot of clothing when they think “hot woman”. Just try to spot the difference between Playboy magnate Hugh Heffner’s girlfriends on reality show The Girls Next Door. Or, for a slightly toned down version of the look, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson or the girls on The Hills.

It filters down further still, from Hollywood to the streets of Sydney’s Paddington and Melbourne’s Prahan, to the point where, if you go out in most Australian cities, you‘ll find masses of girls who are very beautiful … in the same, carefully formulated way. It’s a genre of attractiveness that requires very little thought or translation on the part of the person doing the looking.

Step 2: Origin of the species

So, did women like Heidi Montag spend too much time playing with Barbie dolls when they were kids and now want to turn themselves into a life-sized version? Is it a man thing? Have FHM and Zoo covers infiltrated our brains? Or is the appeal simply a function of our bronzed, beach culture?

According to Courtney Martin, author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body (Simon & Schuster, $35), the media and beauty industries have a lot to do with it. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that beauty is powerful in our society,” she explains. “Too many young women learn this lesson way too well, eschewing their intelligence and originality for a cookie cutter look that they know will open doors… and wallets.”

Step 3: Cosmetic confidence booster

Sally, a 21-year-old student, agrees. “If you look in the men’s mags, they’re all big-boobed, blonde women. It’s the version of attractiveness we’ve been force-fed by the mass media.”

Sally’s beauty routine is comprehensive, but by no means unusual. She cleanses, moisturises, waxes, colours her hair, undergoes microdermabration every couple of months, plus weighs herself twice daily. For Sally and her friends, beauty is a bit of a bonding ritual - and one they reinforce for one another. “We’d all get a spray tan before big events, and get our hair done together,“ she remembers. These days, her friends prepare for the weekend with what they call “Fake tan Friday“. Some of them won’t go out without it.

All this grooming can serve as a confidence boost, but Samantha, a 25-year-old journalist with similarly extensive beauty commitments, doesn’t think it’s that easy. “While they do look ‘hot‘, a lot of women seem to have no confidence because deep down they know that’s not them,” she says.

Step 4: Know your vulnerabilities

Which brings us back to Brigitte, and a chat she shared with fellow housemate Rebecca Morgan who, like Stavaruk, had breast implants and men’s mag aspirations.

You see, Brigitte didn’t always look the way she did in the Big Brother house. That didn’t come as a surprise, but the way she spoke about it did. Beneath her hair extensions, fake tan, breast augmentation and “hot chick” bravado, Brigitte was pretty vulnerable. The beauty she so carefully cultivated was like an armour that protected her from the outside world.

Sally noticed it too. “I think Brigitte hid behind her hair a bit. She needed to prove to people that she was always going to be the pretty blonde girl.” It’s something she can, to an extent, relate to. “I’ve been brunette mostly during times when I was in very secure, long-term relationships,” she explains. “When they’ve ended, it‘s always been, ‘I’ve got to be blonde again‘.”

Step 5: Own your beauty

The trouble is, as Samantha indicated, it’s a very fragile armour. On the one hand, any woman with the time, money and inclination can transform herself into an instant sex symbol. On the other, it’s something we can never truly own, trapped by the fear that without the accoutrements, we’d be less attractive, less noticeable, less lovable.

The good news is that most of us only half believe that. As Katie, a 23-year-old events coordinator, says, “The people who love me would continue loving me,” even if she dropped the hair dye and the solarium visits. But there’s still that other, nagging half: she admits she would feel less attractive without them.

She shouldn’t. “In my research, men are actually more interested in a sense of humour and original, authentic good looks than the Barbie doll imitation,” says Courtney Martin. And that can come in all sorts of different packages. And if they don’t? Martin concludes, “As I always say, if the guy wants Pamela Anderson, you shouldn’t want to have him.”