Rosie Scott Blog about Women

Any subscribers to the Daily Mail schools of 'thought' may have come across the 5:2 skin diet.

This diet has nothing to do with food, but borrows its name from that gimmicky brand of intermittent fasting that gripped fitness fanatics in 2013. You know – the one that had people binging for five days and with empty stomach breath for two, leading to a spike in light-headedness on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This time, beauty gurus have adopted the 5:2 approach to apply to skincare, encouraging women everywhere to eschew makeup for two days a week – consecutive or non-consecutive – and go barefaced.

According to its spruikers, two thirds of women wear makeup seven days a week and 71 per cent have found themselves with skin problems as a result of excessive foundation. The solution, they say, is to let your skin breathe – a get-gorge technique we've heard about as many times as "drink more water".

An apparent authority on the matter, Dr Tijion Esho – whose cosmetic institute is called @lebeau_ideal (because, faux Franco-sophistication) and who tweets from the handle @IAMDRBEAUTIFUL – says, "Taking makeup breaks of one or two days a week will dramatically improve your skin health and appearance by allowing healthy skin cells to regenerate."

Are you sure about that, Dr Beautiful?

Just like its nutritional forbearer, there's a complete dearth of research to back up the supposed benefits of the 5:2 skin diet. When it comes down to it, the restrictive makeup regime isn't that effective, as it takes longer than two days for your skin to regenerate. (Cell turnover takes approximately 27 days, not two. Think of how long it took for those unsightly racer-back tan lines to fade.)

All this is, really, is another hype-driven scheme pushed upon us, urging women to overthink our beauty regimes instead of just doing what we feel is normal.

As a human in possession of a face, sometimes one just doesn't feel the need to slather it with products. And just as rightly, sometimes one wishes to channel makeup's magical power to amp up the hawtness and make us feel five times better about ourselves. Does timing really matter? Why must an explanation or justification be necessary?

Over the years, we've learned collectively as women that dabbing silverly highlighter in the corner of our eyes will instantly make us more 'alluring'. We've been hydration-shamed into drinking 12-plus glasses of water a day and have been taught that contouring is both the greatest thing ever and the biggest time-wasting con of our time. The beauty industry has taught us so many valuable lessons – but the 5:2 skin diet is not one of them.

Our main bugbear is this: Why turn something as joyful as makeup – something that's about personal expression, something that literally turns you into an 'artist' (however amateur), something done on a whim – into a timetabled monotonous routine?

Leading the revolt against the restrictive product practice is the Guardian UK's Victoria Coren Mitchell. Coren Mitchell despises the repetitive drudgery laid out by 5:2, saying, "I have to work quite hard to keep remembering not to be frightened by a beauty industry which threatens the total disintegration of my face and body due to my shameful failure to adopt a proper 'routine'." We certainly feel her pain, especially when reading up on the more onerous aspects of 5:2 dieting.

We always have an option – 7:0, 0:7, 4:3, 2:5 – whatever, it's totally up to us. We resent the fact that loaded language such as 'diet' and 'detoxify' is being used to change our relationship with makeup, to co-opt something every woman has been doing without much thought to begin with, to demonise foundation, and to make us feel guilty or embarrassed whenever we put it on our face.

The 5:2 skin diet is based on the suggestion that being a slave to your makeup bag could be ageing you prematurely, yet wasting good years on such rigid, inane, inflexible modes of thinking is certainly worse.

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