A frankly alarming level of thickness.

Nicky Hambleton-Jones, the annoying host of Channel 4's Ten Years Younger make-over show, says that every time you go to bed without first removing your make-up, your face ages eight days instead of just one. Now, it would be fair to say that I am not a leading expert in the cosmetics field, but I still feel qualified to comment on this. Because I have a brain.

Let's say a girl starts wearing make-up daily when she's fifteen. Yes, most girls probably start earlier than that, but I'm keeping the numbers round. According to Ms Hambleton-Jones, if this girl goes to bed every night without first removing her make-up using a proper cleanser, then, by the time she's twenty, she'll look fifty-five. When she's forty, she'll look two hundred and fifteen.

She tells people this on her show and they just nod and maybe look a bit surprised but they lap it up; they believe this shite. Even worse, her little factoid appears in magazines, with never a single journalist or editor thinking to do a simple sum and question the claim. When the only fact-checking required needs nothing more than a bit of basic arithmetic — and even that can be done by total eejits using calculators — surely everyone's a qualified expert. And doesn't anyone ever wonder even fleetingly about the mechanism in make-up that means it only ages your skin at night? After all, the Hambleton-Jones woman spends a lot of her time telling women who don't wear make-up that they must do so — in order to look younger. See, it keeps you young-looking while you're awake, but wear it while you're asleep and it sends your skin hurtling through time itself. You'd think a proper paid professional journalist might ask her how make-up knows when you're awake. But no, no: it comes from someone in the fashion industry, so it must be true.

Everyone who hears or reads this nasty little woman's stupid vapid bollocks without spluttering at its sheer preposterosity should be forced to.... Actually, you know, I can't think of a better punishment for the idiots than for them to go through life believing people like Nicky Hambleton-Jones.