Beauty salon for children creates a stink

"A beauty parlour has become the first in Britain to offer makeovers, fake tans and facials exclusively for children and toddlers, it has emerged," says everybody's favourite Conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph before going to list the services available at the salon, Trendy Monkeys of Brentwood, including "fruit smoothie facials, mini pedicures, manicures or make-up application, hair “up-dos” and haircuts." And all this in the same week as the Government's new proposals to combat the sexualisation of children! Keen eyes will note that brazilians and vajazzles do not appear.

Trendy Monkeys. Doesn't look all that sexual, does it? Unless monkeys in tutus do it for you. They probably do for some people, but we'd prefer not to Google anything like that just in case we see images.

Apparently, girls as young as one year old can be treated to ""Princess pamper parties", which costs several hundred pounds" which begin with them and up to five friends being "picked up in a pink limousine" and taken to the salon, where doting parents "can pay for extra services including spray tans while having a photographer follow them around."

Professor Judy Hutchings of the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention told the paper that the salon represents "not just the sexualisation but the commercialisation of children." We dislike the sexualisation of children as much as any other normal adult, but the commercialisation bit is stretching things a bit far. The same could be said about The Beano, Ladybird books, Dinky cars and all the other kiddies' products that were with us in that delightful bit of the 1950s with the rosy glow around it, when children were innocent creatures of joy and light and went around with scabby knees saying "brilliant!" and drinking lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Precisely the same thing is going on in the half-timbered cottages of the Black Forest where Geppetto hand carves toys for sale to tourists, in the Tridias shops that were so beloved among the upper middle classes for their traditional toys and lack of the latest kill-em-up videogames, and everywhere else that toys or anything else marketed at and for children has ever been sold.

Tellingly, the Toryrag points out early on in the story that the salon, which opened last weekend, "is located in an area featured in the ITV reality television show The Only Way Is Essex." Two members of the cast were in fact at the opening of the salon, as revealed by The Daily Mail which, predictably, takes a similar line to the broadsheet and has a picture of the celebs in question in Marbella ("Marbella? How vulgar!"). Which rather begs the question: what do we have here? A story which raises legitimate concerns over the way children are being raised in modern society or an opportunity for the newspaper's readers to enjoy a spot of "haw haw, look how tasteless the working classes like the ones in that dreadful programme (which none of us watched, of course, because we're much too highbrow) are, aren't we so much better than them?"-style upper middle class snobbish solidarity over their breakfast coffee this morning?

Bruno star Baron Cohen death threats

Continuing our expedition into the world of tabloid journalism we soon came upon the Daily Express, that once-great newspaper that is nowadays read only by those who collect china with pictures of the Royal family on it, which carries a story on Sacha Baron Cohen (pictured right) - the creator of Ali G, Borat and Bruno - and how he has apparently received death threats from a terrorist organisation called the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade.

The Express got the story via the Daily Star who, they report, say that the AAMB "has claimed responsibility for recent terrorist attacks." Interesting - and why on Earth would a man of Baron Cohen's undoubted intelligence choose to satirise a real terrorist group, since doing so would be tantamount to suicide? Maybe the Express were thinking along the same lines, because they contacted Baron Cohen's spokesperson who told them: "I don't know anything about this."

Hmm. Over to the Star's website for more information it is, then. Using the page's search function, we soon found the following:

(original here)

That looks like the one we're after, doesn't it? So we clicked and were rewarded with:

(original here)

That page had a picture of a very pretty lady without very many clothes on, so that bit was alright; but we do wonder if just maybe the Daily Star is using the time-honoured red-top journalistic technique known as "making stuff up" and had to take the story down a bit sharpish because Baron Cohen's lawyers got in touch? If so, they may well be forced to print an apology - however, we shall never know because one look at the filthy little rag every couple of months is about all we can handle.

Sacha Baron Cohen image from Wikipedia, used in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.