Will Harris on some common little white lies

Having arranged to meet my friend K for an after-work drink, I was slightly nonplussed to find her sat in the middle of Selfridges’ ladies wear department, having a new face applied by a Ukrainian midget with the complexion of a cheesy Wotsit.
“It’s a free makeover,” she hisses, while the midget busies herself among the pots and powders. “Free.”
“Then why are we whispering?” I hiss back.
“Open mouth!” commands the diminutive make-up technician, who is wielding a scarlet lipstick and the look of someone trained to locate every pressure point on the human body, including those only a sharpened eyeliner pencil can reach.

“It’s rare that I get the chance to see a woman’s make-up being applied”

It’s rare that I get the chance to see a woman’s make-up being applied, and for some reason I am fascinated. With just a light dusting of foundation and a slash of lipstick, my friend was transformed from a slightly harried journalist to an alluring, pouting femme fatale, far more suited to the front cover of a magazine than scribbling away inside it.

“It’s uncanny,” I breathe. “You still look like you, but like a better version of you. Like you have a long lost identical twin, but she’s smoking hot.”
K looks at me sideways. “Anyway,” she says to the midget, “I’m not really convinced this is the right brand for me, but thank you so much for the demonstration. It’s so kind of you. Dah-svee-dah-nya.”
As we walk across the shop floor in the direction of the bar, it would be imperceptible to everyone but me that K’s heels are hitting the floor a little more briskly than usual. “My family’s from Russia originally, you know,” she says nonchalantly.

“Um, what just happened? Did you just steal your face?”
“What, a few puffs of powder and some lippie? It’s hardly grand larceny, and besides,” K forces her scarlet lips into a pout that would turn even the most obstinate of heads, “I’ve had a really, really hard day.”
Ensconced in the Wonder Bar and having decided to split a bottle of something, the menu tactfully describes as ‘made in the same style as champagne’, I suddenly get the joke.

As children we’re taught that telling lies is one of the most cardinal of sins, and yet, one way or another, the majority of us will spend the rest of our lives becoming masters of deceit. I’m not talking about big lies like ‘the funds were just resting in that account’ or ‘I did not have sex with that woman’. I’m thinking of those tiny acts of deception we need to carry out on a daily basis just to stay on an even keel. ‘You’ll have the document by Monday’. ‘I’ll pay off my credit card next month’. And of course the most pervasive one of all: ‘This is my real face.’