TWO thousand pounds on make-up since 1999. Now, I ask you, does that really seem such a lot when you're entering the full bloom of middle youth and starting to discover its blessings of thread veins, eye bags, slack jowls and wrinkles?

When you've got a stressful time on your hands, you've made the odd questionable decision and you frankly need a decent cover-up job?

But enough about me. It seems Tony Blair can't drag himself away from the cosmetics counter, either, having racked up a similar four-figure sum on lotions and potions from the turn of the Millennium up to the present day.

I wonder if, when dreaming up the Freedom of Information Act, Mr Blair ever imagined it would one day be used to unearth his cosmetics secrets and strip them bare for all the world to see?

And when his trips to Superdrug came back to haunt him, did he look into his make-up bag and say, "How much? Who, me?"

Ah, Tony, it's so easily done. You may, like me, have only five pieces of make-up that you ever actually use.

You may even find, as I have, that one of these five is a stubby little bit of lippy that dates back to the thirteenth-century, or at any rate, back to your mid-twenties. Hygiene experts can say all they like about chucking your slap out every three months - but what's a girl to do if cosmetics manufacturers persist in discontinuing, say, 'Rouge Eclat' without so much as a by-your-leave?

If you're anything like me, you'll find much of the expense can be put down to an existential and ultimately futile quest for a lipstick or eye-shadow that matches your perfect, but now obsolete, old favourite. Personally, I am in the third decade of my hunt for anything that can rival Vanda's Crme Des Yeux in Bamboo, circa 1976. I thought I'd found a suitable replacement in M & S in the 90s, but guess what? That's been discontinued, too.

The consequence is that my bathroom shelves are groaning beneath the weight of reject make-up that doesn't quite match the idealised perfection of the much-mourned discontinued line. Periodically, these failed cosmetics are all turfed out and sold on at car boot sales. I would never have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes, but many women seem perfectly happy to buy other people's cast-off mascara.

They may be risking blindness, but hey, at least they're not wasting £2,000 on slap.

Apparently, the average British woman spends more like £195 a year, which is still a hell of a lot of trips to the car boot sale.

Once it's all bought, it seems we like to get good value for our money. A survey is meant to have shown that one in four females wear make-up at all times - and that, for Yorkshire women, this means full war paint while playing sport! Mud-wrestling, presumably....

Some might say it's all a bit of a waste of money and effort; the survey goes on to suggest that 65 per cent of men (Tony Blair apart) consider heavy make-up to be a turn-off.

Imagine that! We women have spent half our lives researching and buying the perfect camouflage kit in the hope of boosting our self-esteem and our attractiveness, when all the time the blokes preferred our natural inner beauty.

That must be where Jordan and Jodie Marsh have been going wrong all these years.

Updated: 09:09 Wednesday, July 27, 2005