Katie Holland: Crazy obsessions of beauty and beasts

Don't try this at home kids.

WHAT a week of weirdness it's been. Ugly provincial girls, ponytails and self mutilation in the name of "beauty" - where does one start?

Let's start with the one that freaked me out the most. No, not the Prime Minister pulling hair (we'll get to that later) - I'm talking the Kylie Jenner Challenge, the latest craze doing the rounds on social media.

Here's the lowdown. Kylie Jenner - Kim Kardashian's sister and a reality TV "star" - is 17 and has extremely pouty lips, which she puts down to clever makeup rather than cosmetic surgery.
The look has spurred a craze of young girls, and some boys, putting their lips in a small glass, sucking in, then pulling the glass off to try to emulate her pout. Being 2015, they film it and post the results on the internet.

The sucking action bursts the blood vessels around the lips and mouth, leaving them immediately swollen.

It also often backfires, leaving perfectly nice looking youngsters with grotesque, cartoonesque-sized lips and bruised, bleeding faces.

It is as absolutely ridiculous as it sounds.

I try to think back to beauty crazes when I was a teen, because surely this must just be the modern version of something equally stupid from the 80s or 90s.

But I can't think of anything. Perhaps because we were too busy playing sport to worry about what we looked like.

And Facebook and Instagram hadn't been invented.

Maybe it's also because we grew up in the provinces, where we're a bit backward and a bit ugly?

You see, according to Bob Jones writing in his NZ Herald column this week, there are no pretty girls in the provinces.

It's because, he says, the pretty ones get the heck out of places like Rotorua as soon as they can to head to the big smoke where their beauty can shine.

Whereas the fat, plain girls go the opposite way and move from cities to provincial towns where, if they're really lucky, they should be able to snare some average provincial bloke and become a wife.

(He also remarked in the same column how hairdressers don't read newspapers.)

Mr Jones told the tale of betting a friend $20 he couldn't find a pretty girl in an unnamed provincial town.

Had it been Rotorua, he need only have looked as far as my local hairdressers to find a selection of pretty girls. Where I have in the past even spotted them reading a newspaper. Probably looking for jobs in Auckland, hoping to bag themselves a big-city man they could bring home occasionally and show off to their ugly friends.

Now, I'm pretty sure Mr Jones was writing for a reaction on both points, and the only reaction it deserves is a laugh. But some people seem to have got their knickers in a twist, judging by comments on the Herald website.

Speaking of which, on to the news story of the week, which has made headlines around the world.

By now more has been written and said about Ponytail-gate than any one clump of hair in New Zealand history.

It's just bemusing. Maybe not for the waitress, granted, whose experience does sound creepy and unpleasant.

John Key came into our newsroom once, not within ponytail-yanking proximity, but that was creepy enough for me.

What a strange old place, filled with strange folk, this world is.