Duck Face

I learned something last week from a bunch of young people and I can’t believe that I’ve never heard of it before.

I am talking about the duck face, an expression that is used by people, usually females, to appear sexy. I know that some women do this, but I have always called it the trout pout.

The idea that the woman concerned seductively pushes out here lips as if she is about to kiss you. The young man who pointed it out, showed me numerous examples, mainly on his dating phone app, Tinder, with most women standing there holding a phone, having taken a selfie in the mirror, from above while shaping their body such that they appear to be thinner.

He moaned about it because having looked at so many duck faces, he couldn’t actually tell how attractive the women really were.

What has happened to the world?

In the past, photographs of women used to show them with an attractive natural looking smile on their faces in a largely natural pose. Personally I would like to see a woman smiling or laughing in a natural pose than to see her pouting her lips with her hand on her hip and her legs crossed in a kind of surreal posture that looks like a human teapot.

If I were young, free and single I wouldn’t want to date a woman whose only photo made her look weird. Imagine meeting her in a bar based solely on a duck face photo; I probably wouldn’t recognise her unless she pouted and then I’d expect her first word to be “QUACK!”.

I blame the cult of celebrity.

Many actresses use the trout pout and the same pose when they are on the red carpet at some stupid award ceremony. In fact, it’s not just photographs. A lot of actresses pout at every opportunity when acting in a movie or a TV programme. Imagine a scene in a restaurant and the leading man is chatting to his leading lady. As she listens to his romantic words, she pouts like a trout as listens – after all, she has to look good, doesn’t she? I would love it if a waiter came up at that point and said “We have two specials today; duck bill and trout lips”.

Worse, it seems that celebrities are taking this a step further and actually "enhancing their lips”, making them plumper by injecting them with an expensive and horrific chemical to do this. One of the main reasons, I believe, is an attempt to make them look younger and more seductive, particularly as they get older.

I’m sad about this because I always believe that people of both sexes should grow old gracefully. The problem is for female actresses as they get older, they are overlooked for parts as film makers choose younger and more attractive women in their place.

This is ridiculous.

The only ugly people you see in films and television series are bad guys or evil people. There are a couple of American television shows that I watch regularly and everybody in them is totally attractive – even the older people.

We seem to be losing the realism. Why can’t characters be portrayed by real people?

Don’t get me wrong, there are some ugly actors, but the latest trend seems to be that the actors portraying ordinary people have to be beautiful people.

No wonder young women are resorting to pouting their lips to look like Donald Duck.

When I was a kid, I did briefly want to be an actor. I appeared in a couple of junior school plays, in particular, Sleeping Beauty where I played the “handsome prince” and had to kiss Clare Bloggs (name changed to protect the poor girl’s identity) during rehearsals and in front of her parents. I also played the Griffon in Alice in Wonderland where I had to dress up with wings and feathers.

I thought I was a good little actor – I was only nine or ten at the time – and had delusions of being the next Laurence Olivier. Sadly as I got older, I realised that I wasn’t a beautiful person and would probably have faced numerous rejections for looking like a strategically shaved orangutan.

The Plastic Mancunian auditions for the part of Jack Reacher

This is just another thing I will change when I become President of the World.

I will make it illegal to pose with a duck face, make cosmetic surgery illegal and also ensure that ugly actors and actresses get key parts in films.

I mean – look at Tom Cruise, a man universally considered to be a good looking actor. He is a very good actor and I love a lot of his films but there is one part that I genuinely laughed at when I heard he was playing it. I’ve read a couple of novels by Lee Child when on holiday. He is the man who created Jack Reacher, an ex-military policeman. They sound cheesy and they are – but they are good reads for travelling or a holiday as long as you can stand his writing style (which isn’t brilliant) and can suspend your disbelief. Lee Child describes Jack Reacher as a huge man, 6ft 5 inches with a 50 inch chest who looks like he can literally tear a man in half. Yet the actor chosen to play him is Tom Cruise who is not huge at all – at 5ft 7 inches he is almost a foot shorter. Tom Cruise is almost 5 inches shorter than I am!

Dwayne Johnson might not be as good an actor but at 6ft 5 and built like a brick shithouse, he would at least look like a Jack Reacher type fellow.

I’m sure there is a parallel universe out there where I am a successful Hollywood actor or maybe President of the Earth.

And in either of those places I can promise you this; I will not have a duck face!