Cosmopolitan devotes half its pages to encouraging readers to be independent babe feminists the rest to recommending ways to find and

Cosmopolitan devotes half its pages to encouraging readers to be independent babe feminists, the rest to recommending ways to find and keep their guy. Marie Claire masquerades as a serious and caring showcase for photojournalism, when most people read it for the voyeuristic thrill. We call it having our cake (double double chocolate, please) and eating it.Men’s magazines have tended to be more straightforward. Arena is for self-confessed fashion victims who are indeed self-confessed fashion victims; Loaded is for sexist, lager-drinking idiots who admit to being sexist, lager-drinking idiots.

Men’s Health,however, is all over the place – tips from Woman’s Own c.1953, backlash paranoia straight out of Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, and a non-stop improve-your-life prescription borrowed from Cosmopolitan.Do you want to be fitter? Have straighter toenails? Die coming in the back seat of a Soviet jet? Eat more broccoli? Be more in control of your anterior cruciate ligaments? Have a girlfriend who leaves only clean knickers on the floor? Know how to be tough with wasps? Borrow nail polish while staying butch?We know it’s confusing being a guy in the Nineties But surely not that confusing.. The eyes have it Well, more precisely, strange and unusual eyes have it By “it” I mean “sex appeal”. Eyes may be the double-glazing of the soul and all, but we don’t fully realise how much eye colour means to us Think about it. Where would our heroines be without their limpid pools? Elizabeth Taylor without her violet peepers? Lawrence of Arabia without Peter O’Toole’s ice-blue orbs? David Bowie without his mismatched glazzies? Nowhere, that’s where.
Well, that’s exactly where I’m coming from. Despite my amazing body and perfect mind, I am cursed with a pair of myopic and astigmatic eyes.

Even worse than their inability to see oncoming trees is their colour: a middling, dead grey. The nicest thing any man ever said about them was: “They are like Highland mist.” What!? You mean like cold, vague and shifty? Thanks a bunch.That’s why I jumped – okay, it was a fall over an unseen chair – to try FreshLook Colours, Britain’s first disposable coloured contact lenses. That’s right, alongside eyeglasses, monocles, pince-nez, bifocals, trifocals, flip-ups, glare-free, hard contacts, soft contacts, toric lenses, gas permeables and – pant – disposable contact lenses, come disposable coloured contact lenses.Having worn lenses for yonks, I am the perfect guinea pig. Not only have I experimented with every kind on the market, my natural eye-colour just isn’t me. I’ve already bleached my teeth, so it’s only natch to accessorise the eyeballs. (What I mean really, of course, is that I need help: I’m unmarried, for chrissakes.)After a quicky fitting at Chinatown’s Sightcare, where I was treated like the Queen of Sheba, I was given four different shades – Baby Blue, Hazel, Emerald Green and Violet – which were virtually guaranteed to disguise my pallid iris and allow me to see the numbers on buses before it’s too late.For those of you who aren’t familiar with contact lenses, let me fill you in.

The first coloured lenses I ever wore were just hard circles of green or blue transparent material. Visibly smaller than your real iris, these were basically coloured tiddlywinks They tended to tint your entire world to their colour. I reckon those primitive prototype lenses are singly responsible for the weird colour combinations of the garish Seventies.Today’s coloured reusable soft lenses – corrective or purely decorative – are much better than those little eye-frisbees of old These FreshLook ones are even better. They are dot-matrixed with a realistic iris-like pattern of colour.