Tonight:
8°c
Is anything less attractive than a man with middle-aged spread? How about a middle-aged man afflicted with vanity spread? News that our menfolk will soon be able to purchase a £49 male girdle - or "mirdle" - to hold in their fleshy parts is worrying indeed.
It's part of a trend towards male physical perfection that leaves many women, myself included, stone cold. I'd take rough and paunchy over soft-skinned and pedicured any day - and so would most of my friends. What a shame men don't realise that all they need to do to keep us happy is trim their nose-hair once in a while.
In London, where men already groom more obsessively than in the outlying regions, the mirdle represents the tip of a very large iceberg. The signs that male beauty is on the rise are all too evident, from the preening salons of Knightsbridge to Harley Street's Botox parlours. All of them report increased traffic from furrow-browed men. Even my Pilates studio, once a women-only preserve, has a 50/50 gender split these days as men work at whittling away their waists.
It's not just that men are swapping tips on how to wear "manscara" and where to get your male-specific waxing done. My hairdresser also reports a male-led rise in demand for colour - to cover silver hairs that were once the mark of a distinguished gent. And the various oases of beauty I frequent say custom from men is growing fast. It's not called a man-icure for nothing.
This polishing away of the masculine traits is not to be encouraged. Even my thick-skinned Scottish partner - a staunch pamper-refusenik - recently tried what he witheringly calls "a treatment". It only involved submersion in a bath of health-giving minerals but days later he was still admiring his newly-glowing complexion. Now I fear I've turned him on to an expensive habit.
I'm all for handsome men but being a slave to beauty is, and should remain, a female burden to bear. We might need help to halt the ageing process but men's sexual allure increases with age.
For my money, it doesn't get much better than Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino; grizzled and gloriously rugged, he's the sexiest pensioner in Hollywood. And sure, Brad Pitt's a pin-up but much more so when he looks battered in Babel than his baby-faced persona in Benjamin Button.
So cast off your dye and bin the hand cream, guys. Real men don't do mirdles.
