IT'S not a particularly good look, when you’re making a stack of money out of what looks to everyone else like trivial fun, to gripe about how unfair it is that celebrities have it better. But that, essentially, is the complaint of the hugely successful make-up blogger James Charles, who has around six million followers, happens to be 46th on the Instagram rich list published last week by Hopper HQ, and charges, on average, around £7,340 per post.

Charles, a charismatic 19-year-old, gay vlogger who always introduces himself to the make-up wearing sisterhood with the phrase, "Hi sisters!", last week took to Twitter to have a good old moan about the various ways in which YouTubers are misunderstood, not given enough credit, and not quite recognised as the major celebrities they really are. “Only major difference,” he pointed out, between celebrities and YouTubers, “is the pay gap & respect”. He also went on to moan about being “paid a FRACTION by advertisers & still not taken seriously by brands or media”.

My first reaction was to think, “he’s young, he’ll soon get through this whole narcissistic phase and learn to sound a bit less arrogant”. The social media star who gained wider fame when he became the face for the CoverGirl cosmetics brand in 2017, must, after all, realise that actually most YouTubers earn very little, particularly since the platform tightened its rules around monetisation. He happens not to be hard done by, but is one of the huge successes of the platform. But, perhaps, staring at his own face for too long, has meant that he no longer has the perspective to recognise that.

And he’s not alone. We live in a culture in which the selfie, and what we can do to it – through make-up, apps like Facetune, filters and lighting – is a prime focus. This is the navel into which millions gaze. Charles, revealingly, is just one of many beauty gurus on the Instagram rich list. Indeed, Hopper HQ lists Huda Beauty as the top non-celebrity influencer. In other words, the people who are having the greatest impact on our collective, digital psyche are, effectively, those who are telling us how to manipulate our selfie.

Of course, these social media stars are also artists and personalities, with talent and craft, and even sometimes a message. Perhaps, as in the case of James Charles, they happen to be breaking gender stereotypes and presenting an interesting role model to young gay men and boys. Perhaps, like Zoella, they have been vocal about anxiety and mental health. But still, they are the faces that lead us back to our own faces and keep us distracted there.

I’m not blaming the youngsters, the so-called “selfie generation”. I’m sure if my age group had, as teens, been handed a front-facing camera, and the technology with which to manipulate our own images, we would have done exactly the same – indeed some of us have done. Narcissism has long been a human trait. Centuries ago it was only royalty, the aristocracy, and later rich merchants and industrialists, who could afford to get a selfie painted. Now we can all preen like kings.

Nor am I blaming past generations. There’s a tendency to castigate parents for over-fostering their children’s self-esteem, and creating a generation that craves followers and approval. But they did what they did because that was the prevailing belief at the time. We’re all just tiny fish swept along by waves of technology, culture and opinion.

Nevertheless, the ascendancy and popularity of the beauty vlogger should remind us that selfie culture is something we need to resist. There is more to life than retouching a face, however beautiful one makes it, or however authentically you do it.

More sex? Only if it's awkward.

THE BBC has announced that it will be airing what the Daily Mail has described as its “most X-rated” and “raunchiest” drama ever, and my immediate reaction is one of mild terror. On self-examination I’ve realised there are probably several reasons for this. One is that this looks as if it’s set to be one of those have-more-sex-in-mid-life stories – like the one told by US author Brittany Gibbons, who decided to rejuvenate her sex life by having sex every night of the year – that is only likely to make me feel I am inadequate and simply not trying hard enough.

The other is that, at a time when it seems like pornography is almost everywhere – while at the same time young people are having sex less – what we probably need to rejuvenate our sex lives is less on-screen sex. Pre-publicity for the show seems to emphasise that the drama will deliver drug use, masturbation and swearing, all of which sounds like the same tired stuff that we’ve seen before and should ideally treat as normal, rather than some outrageous titillation for the screen.

That said, there is more to Wanderlust than just the X-rating. There is, for instance, the talented actress Toni Collette, who has commented on how much show dwells on “the awkwardness, the fumbling, the moments in between”. Talk like this wins me over. In fact, a whole show about awkwardness could be my cup of tea. Forget wild, aspirational romping, what we need to see more of is the everyday, embarrassing fumble.