All smiles on our cover shoot day
Photographs Paul Buller. Hair and make-up Roisin Donaghy at Joy Goodman agency
When we launched our Face of healthy competition in association with Beauty Kitchen, we didn’t know what to expect. Would anyone actually enter? (Would one of the healthy team have to pretend to be the winner – spoiler alert: magazines do sometimes ‘help’ these things along a bit so as to be sure they’ll have someone who looks ‘right’ on their cover.) Anyway – we didn’t. We write a lot about authenticity (in fact, we’ve a feature about it on page 48) and it would have seemed unforgivable to have been anything other than honest with you. So we took a deep breath and went for it, with fingers crossed and no back-up plan.
Turns out we needn’t have worried. If there was one thing Jo Chidley, from Beauty Kitchen, and I were 100 per cent sure about, it was that we wanted ‘real life’ beauties; not just the usual model types. Neither of us accepts you can’t be beautiful if you’re over 40, or a size 14, or short. And you proved us right. Reading through your hundreds of entries, two truths jumped out at us.