Sunday Telegraph Column: Are you a Rihanna or a Jen?

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There’s an episode of my favourite TV show, Mad Men, where the advertising lads come up with a bra campaign stating that every woman is either a Marilyn Monroe or a Jackie O. The message was are you bold, sexy and adventurous, or are you elegant, polished and chic?

Obviously Jackie and Marilyn are two extremes, and this advertisement was a grotesque generalisation, but you get it right away. Even if you’re not much like either of these women, whose styles were so vastly different (unlike their choice in men) if forced you’d be able to find something you can identify with or aspire to in either Jackie or Marilyn, two equally powerful, alluring women.

I’ve decided to thieve this template and declare that when it comes to hair and makeup you’re either a Jennifer (Aniston) or a Rihanna. Both are modern day beauty icons, but for very different reasons.

I much prefer Rihanna. She’s a beauty renegade. She hurled that whole long-haired-pretty-girl thing business out the door years ago, cutting her hair off, sassing council-worker-vest orange lipstick and making fortnightly visits to her tattooist. (I can’t wait to see what she pulls out of her Louis Vuitton luggage when she touches down in Sydney next weekend.)

Her attire, makeup and hair are spectacularly edgy and yet somehow she manages to avoid becoming a resident of Too Much town, a small settlement boasting such residents as Lady Gaga, Bai Ling and Paris Hilton.

Rihanna cops a lot of stick for her audacious choices, but I salute her. She’s confident and sassy enough to carry it off. If only more women were so bold, were such inspiring beauty risk-takers, wearing fuchsia lips or icy eye shadow with reckless abandon.

The way you wear your hair and paint your face is undeniably a statement about how you feel, and I found it fascinating the way Rihanna turned the Wild Dial up 2677% once she’d come reached the light at the end of the Chris Brown tunnel. You do not shave your head, wear red lipstick, see-through dresses and enormous sunglasses inside (at night) unless you’re feeling pretty powerful.

Perhaps you’re more ‘Jen’, though, who is, by all accounts (and there are several million) equally as self-confident, but who prefers to express the happiness within in a more subdued fashion. Her hair is always long, feminine and rarely varies in cut or style, and her makeup is chic, natural, flattering and timeless. The look is polished, classic, simple. She’s quite happy with her brown eye shadow and nude lipstick, thank you very much, and you can take your liquid eyeliner wings on your way out.

Most women actually probably sit somewhere between these two beauty icons, but if you strongly identify with one, mix things up a little. Play with people’s perception of you. After all, tampering with what “you always do” is not only criminally enjoyable, but a fascinating social experiment – people respond very differently to the undercut brigade to the long-n-layered clique.

Being a beauty editor AND a woman, and therefore by law required to change my mind about my appearance 84 times a day, I prefer not to entirely align with Jen or Rihanna, instead flipping in hysterical fashion between the two with the grace of a moth belting into a window illuminated by a strong lamp.

But I’m definitely a Marilyn.

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