Scarlett Says

by Scarlett Moffatt

  My friend Sam put as her Facebook status once, ‘I was the lucky fat girl today. I managed to get something in a size 16!’ She always says that there will only be one curvy girl who gets lucky on a Saturday afternoon because shops will only ever have one of each item of clothing in a bigger size.

  There will be rails of smaller sizes and everyone will be knocking each other out the way with their handbags to get the one bigger size. It’s like shops are ashamed to stock things above a 12 when statistically more women in the country are a size 16 than any other size. What do they expect them to wear?

  I bet there was a point back in the day when all of the shops realized that all they had to do was make us feel really shit about ourselves and we’d buy more clothes to make ourselves feel better. So they made sure literally no one would ever look the same shape as the mannequins. And then the magazines were like, ‘Ooh, I think we could help with making women feel like shit too.’ So we had like fifty years of that. And now they don’t even have to pay people upfront, they’ve got people volunteering to take photos of themselves on Instagram that make us all feel really shit about the way we look. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the definition of progress. Although I’m sure we probably all feel like this no matter what shape and size we are.

  I went to see Nicky Minaj in concert last year. She did the talky-shouty voice thing. My mate thought she was possessed. She did that song where she insulted skinny bitches and I was like, ‘You’re skinny, you just have a big implanted arse.’

  I feel like people can’t win when it comes to the whole body-shaming thing. I felt dead sorry for Cheryl24 when everyone was commenting on her losing weight. You’re either too fat or you’re too thin. Can the media please print exactly how they think everyone should look so we can make sure we adhere to the rules?

  One minute someone is too big, the next they’re too small. It’s almost worse when women body-shame other women. I’ve been asked to do so many interviews about weight loss for magazines, and some have even said they’ll pay me to lose weight for a feature. WTF? Never in a million years.

  We’re all different so there is no such thing as the right shape. In fact, there is. Your shape is the right shape, whatever shape that is.

  It’s like when a newspaper does a story about an actress at a premiere or something and they’re like, ‘So and so was flaunting her shoulders last night,’ and they’re literally just standing there, in a dress. It’s true they’ve got shoulders but my English teacher must have taught me a different definition of ‘flaunting’ because I didn’t think it meant that.

  Solo shopping

  With all the stress of being in a shop, I can’t be arsed to wait around while everyone tries on ten tops. People think I’m weird but I would much rather go shopping on my own than with my mates. I refuse to go shopping with the girls. They’ll have shopping days out and when they invite me I’m like, ‘Nah, I’m all right.’ I can’t be arsed with fannying around. I’m also too easily influenced. I’ll try something on and think it’s minging and before I know it I’ll be at the till paying for it because they’ve all convinced me it looks great. Then I get it home and realize I was right all along and have to go through the pain of taking it back.

  I’m definitely a loner when it comes to shopping, but I don’t mind going with me mam because that’s different. She’s always totally honest with me and she gets shit done. She’s like, ‘Try it on, buy it or leave.’ I like that kind of no-nonsense shopping attitude. She’s like the Terminator of shopping buddies.

  Designer clothes

  My mates and I love it when we get a bargain. We’re all like, ‘Guess how much this was? It was dead cheap!’

  It’s nice having nice things, but I would never spend hundreds of pounds on a top. I stop wearing things as soon as they start reappearing on my Facebook page so I’d rather buy things I don’t feel too guilty about not wearing again.

  My friend loves Vivienne Westwood and it’s not even that expensive but I still wouldn’t spend £70 on a T-shirt when you can buy one from Primark for £1.50. People only do it so they can say, ‘It’s so and so.’ I don’t even know who half of the designers are to be honest, and I don’t care. It’s not like I’m going to be begging an outfit off them for the Oscars any time soon.

  The ten last things I bought

  1) A cinema ticket

  2) Caramel popcorn and a large ice blast

  3) A blow-dry at Truly Scrumptious in Bishop Auckland

  4) A shirt dress from River Island

  5) A Mac lipstick in Velvet Teddy

  6) A Toshiba laptop

  7) A Jacqueline Wilson magazine for my little sister

  8) Fake Bake darker spray tan

  9) Two Pornstar Martinis from Fat Buddha in Durham

  10) Five pairs of false eyelashes

  Tantastic

  Once the outfit decision has been made, I can get on with everything else.

  The most important part for me has already started, though.

  OK, it’s not exactly a secret that I love fake tan. Probably more than most of my friends. In fact, some of my mates don’t even wear it, and they really suit the natural look, but it creates a lot of problems when we take photos on a night out. It’s really difficult to find a filter where I don’t look like I’m an incredibly weird colour.

  My friend took a picture recently where I looked like Piccadilly because of the filter she used. No, hang on, it’s piccalilli, isn’t it? She said it was the only filter where I didn’t look green; so instead I looked luminous yellow.

  Some of my friends don’t like me staying over at their house after a night out because of my fake tan. If I stay at Kelly’s, she gets really upset because I leave a tan outline of my body on her bed sheet that looks like one of those chalk drawings you get when someone’s been murdered.

  I get told off by me mam all the time for leaving fake tan on our bathroom floor. I always put a towel down but I often miss a bit, and the amount of times me mam’s slipped over is ridiculous. I’ll just hear a thud and then a really loud, ‘SCARLETT!’ It makes me laugh so much. All of my family have got permanently tanned soles of their feet, and the bathroom door is kind of a mottled brown colour now, so that’s starting to get a tan too. But Ava does all right out of it. I pay her to do my back now she’s old enough, and sometimes if she’s feeling cheeky she’ll charge me a bloody fiver for it because she knows I have no choice. She’s like a mini Alan Sugar with a tanning mitt.

  I also get her to dry my hair for me sometimes so I can get on with doing my make-up to save time. She doesn’t style it or anything, she literally just dries it, but needless to say she charges for that too . . .

  One day I went to work without any fake tan on and people kept asking me if I was ill. I’ve got really fair skin and really dark hair so I looked like a pale goth. I’m genuinely almost see-through and my veins glow as if they’re under UV lighting so I do look really different. Everyone was so confused and I was saying to them, ‘This is my actual skin. This is just what I look like.’ I think I’m going to have to wear fake tan forever now. I’m going to be a very orange ninety-year-old.

  Me mam used to put fake tan on a plate and then use a mini paint roller to apply it on me. It lasted for bloody days. My school uniform consisted of a yellow shirt and pale blue jumper, so you can imagine how dark I looked wearing that. I think it’s the reason I didn’t win any dancing awards until I was about twelve. I probably looked absolutely fucking terrifying.

  I used to use this gold Rimmel powder me mam bought me as well, and my nanny’s got this massive portrait of me on her wall from my dancing days where I’ve got a monobrow, fake eyelashes and a face like the sun. I looked like one of those people who dresses up as a gold statue and stands in Covent Garden trying to get money out of tourists. The best thing is that I’m wearing a yellow dress in the photo and she’s put it in a gold frame. She doesn’t need to put any lights on in her hallway because that picture literally glows
. She could put them up all over her house and save a fortune on electricity.

  I think when you start wearing fake tan you have to be in it for the long haul and be prepared to put in the hours and have the right tools. You’ve got to dedicate a night to exfoliating and moisturizing, and then get up in the morning to do the actual tan. You’ve got to have at least one spare mitt just in case as well. I used to use a bloody sock to put me tan on!

  I would now honestly rather go out with old fake tan on than no fake tan on. You know when your tan is a few days old it can go a bit green? I would rather top that up and go out looking like Shrek than take the whole lot off and go out looking like Casper.

  Sometimes my skin goes really patchy and I look like I’ve got a skin disease, and that’s when I know I have to completely start over again. I have to go right back to the beginning and redo the entire routine, but it’s worth it. It’s like painting the Forth Bridge. Honestly, it’s like my hobby.

  Essex

  I feel as if Essex is the place I’d have to live if I ever moved down south. No one wears fake tan in London, so Essex is the only place that I’d be accepted as part of the fake-tanned community. Although I probably wouldn’t be able to understand a word anyone was saying and vice versa. We’d need a phrasebook to translate.

  I was reading the other day that experts are starting to find out about the negative effects of fake tan. Apparently it can cause mood swings so I’m going to use it as an excuse now whenever I feel shit. ‘It’s not me being moody, it’s the tan talking.’

  Ballroom dancing

  I started wearing fake tan properly, out of choice, when I was thirteen. But I wore it from an even younger age because I did a lot of ballroom dancing, so I was a pretty early starter.

  I was five when I started ballroom dancing but I didn’t start competing until I was six. I loved it but unfortunately it was in the pre-Strictly Come Dancing days so everyone used to take the mickey out of how old-fashioned it was.

  I carried on dancing until I was twenty-one. The first nine years everyone was all ‘Why do you do old-people dancing?’ When I won awards and I’d be in the local paper, kids at school would make comments about it being old people dancing, so it was such a relief when Strictly started because people got interested in it and it became ‘cool’, and some were actually really impressed.

  But before then my life was basically the plot of a very low-budget version of one of those Step Up films. Ballroom dancing was so uncool back then that I knew a boy who changed his name when he danced so people in his area didn’t know it was him. Another guy I knew pretended his trophies were for drumming.

  Going to the Blackpool ballroom was always the highlight of my year. I used to think it was magical when the piano player came up from underneath the floor.25

  I think dancing helped to make me confident. You dance with someone really closely and you have to make a lot of eye contact, and even now I’m never scared of looking in people’s eyes when I speak to them. Some people will look everywhere but at you when you’re having a conversation, and I probably come across as quite scary because I don’t take my eyes off people. Sometimes I have to make myself look away and then look back so I don’t seem like a serial killer.

  I’d love to go on Strictly but I just don’t think they’d let me on. I’m basically a ringer, as I’ve danced against some of the professionals in competitions when I was younger.

  I stopped ballroom dancing about five years ago because it took up so much of my time, but I used to go to competitions in Portugal and Paris, and I’ve won national titles. I was trained by Anton du Beke from Strictly back in the day. He’s such a lovely man.

  I watch it now and I do have a slightly different take on the show. I’ll be watching someone dance and I’ll say, ‘He had no rise and fall and no lilt,’ and my dad will look at me like I’m mental and then Len Goodman will comment and he’ll say exactly the same thing.

  Me little snippet of wisdom on the subject: people with glasses tend to be shit dancers. It’s just physics. The laws of physics.

  Tanorexia

  I reckon the newspapers tried to make this a thing when it wasn’t. They found one woman who did it and they were like, ‘Tanorexia is sweeping the country.’ And I reckon they were basically just really proud of the pun. That woman was an amazing colour, though.

  Round our end, people started taking these pills and injecting themselves with this stuff that made you get a tan. Everyone I knew was doing it. It gave them a tan but it was giving them really bad migraines. And there were loads of people doing it.

  I remember when that orange juice Sunny Delight was massive years ago and there was this news story that did the rounds saying that it was turning people orange. I can remember drinking so much Sunny D so I’d look tanned. It didn’t work, though, so that’s how I can say with absolute confidence: that story was bollocks.

  Hair

  The second most important part of my night out preparations is my hair. If I’m going out on a Friday night, I’ll wash and blow-dry my hair in the morning before work so that I can do it quickly when I get in, otherwise it would add another hour on to my prep.

  If we’re off out on a Saturday, it becomes a part of my day-long prep. I’ve got really thick hair and hair extensions, so it takes forever to dry – sometimes up to an hour and a half! That’s why I have to plan ahead and rope Ava in to help, at great expense.

  I think it’s a northern thing but when I was at school I used to wrap my fringe around a Coca Cola can and hairspray if for about twenty seconds so it formed a big roll, and then I’d scrape the rest of my hair back. It would be so much easier if I could do that now and not look like a total twat.

  In fact, I went through a real chav stage when I was thirteen. As I’ve said, I was a funny-looking kid but I always dressed nice and had heels and nice dresses and that, but when I got to thirteen I decided I wanted to be a chav to fit in. Everyone has that stage. So I made me mam buy me loads of Fred Perry stuff and threw out me heels. Lots of England shirts and denim skirts and Nike Air Max, which are now cool in a retro way. I had the tracksuits with poppers on the legs. Thinking about it now, I’m not really sure why there were poppers. Maybe to make them into flares if you wanted?

  I literally based my style on Vicky Pollard from Little Britain. I remember watching an episode when she had loads of scrunchies in her hair and she was like, ‘That’s how many people I’ve had a fight with.’ And I went in the next day and wore loads of scrunchies to make myself look hard. That lasted three months and then I came to my senses.

  The hairdryer

  If I’m feeling a bit flashy at the weekend, I may go to the hairdresser’s and get a proper blow-dry on a Saturday morning. But generally I’ll do it myself, which drives me dad mad because he moans about all the hair in the sink. He says it looks like a monkey has had a shave in the basin.

  I love having long hair but it’s such an effort. By the time I’ve finished doing it I feel like I’ve been to the gym and done a proper workout. My arms really ache and I’ll have a right sweat on. I once sweated so much while I was trying to blow-dry my hair I had to have another shower wearing a massive shower cap before I could get dressed.

  It doesn’t help that my bedroom is like a bloody Harry Potter cupboard. I’ve got the worst bedroom in the house because it’s tiny, so if someone walks in after I’ve been using my hairdryer they get whacked in the face by the heat. It’s like that feeling when you get off a plane when you go on holiday and feel like you’re being beaten around the face by the humidity.

  The tiny bedroom

  I’m so cross about the utter shitness of my room. Back in the days when I was the favourite child, before our Ava came along, I had the biggest bedroom and the little room I’m in now just to watch TV in. I was really spoilt.

  Even in our old house I had two rooms – my lilac room and my animal room – but I get none of that now. When Ava was born I got demoted to the second biggest bedroom in
the house because my parents needed the big room to put the cot in, and then when Ava was old enough she moved into the little room.

  Then I went away to uni, which was a big mistake, because when I came back I’d been moved into the tiny cupboard room and Ava had taken over my bedroom. I walked in and I was like, ‘Where’s all my stuff?’ and then found it squeezed into the cubbyhole. Gutted.

  I feel like Alice in Wonderland when I’m in that bedroom. You know that bit where her arms and legs are poking out of windows? That’s me when I try to go to bed. The room is a weird shape as well, so I have to jump over my bed to get to my things. I don’t need to be doing an assault course before a night out. Not after all the effort of doing my hair.

  Even though my bedroom is tiny, Ava will only dry my hair in there because I’m not allowed in hers. She’s got a sign on the door that says ‘No Scarletts allowed’. I don’t know why; it’s not like I’m nasty to her or anything. I asked her the other day why she won’t let anyone in there and she said it’s because she needs her own space. She’s not even ten.

  It’s no wonder she wants to stay in there, though. She’s got Netflix and Sky Plus to enjoy and I don’t even have bloody Freeview. I’ve been totally demoted. I feel like a second-class citizen in my own home. If I was on the Titanic, I’d have been right below deck playing banjo with all the Irish people, and me mam, dad and Ava would have been sitting up in the Palm Court having dinner with the captain.

  Sky Plus

  I still can’t get my head around the idea that you can pause telly. Sometimes I forget when you’re watching live and I get frustrated that you can’t fast-forward into the future. When I was little I used to line up all my video boxes and pretend I was Dorothy on the yellow brick road. And when I had a hamster I made him these amazing mazes out of all of them, too. And I was telling Ava about that and she was like, ‘What is a video?’ So I told her it’s a big square thing with one film on it. Then I started telling her about going to Woolworths to get tapes to record music off the radio. She looked at me like I was an old lady from the past. Fair dos, she’s got better technology, but she’ll never know the joy of pick’n’mix from Woolworths.