The Only Way is…Tango

A year after the emergence of the reality television series The Only Way is Essex, based in the county of Essex, and Geordie Shore, set in Newcastle upon Tyne, the programmes have captured the hearts of the Great British public.

Although Essex was previously synonymous with white stilettos and unintelligent, tacky women, the county has recently enjoyed a tourist boost as fans of the series flock to the region in the hope of running into the cast and to visit the tanning salons and nail parlours frequented by their on-screen idols. Newcastle upon Tyne has similarly enjoyed an increase in tourism since the reality television programme aired on MTV where fans have flocked to the eighth biggest party capital of the world to emulate the outrageous antics of Britain’s most famous Geordies on a night out in the North East of England. However, it seems that tourism industry isn’t the only effect that the reality television series are having in the United Kingdom.

The ‘more is more’ approach to make up, which is widely sported by the female cast members of The Only Way is Essex, from the former Playboy bunny Chloe Sims sporting an unnatural orange ‘Essex tan’ and perfectly manicured false nails to the beautician Amy Childs sporting dramatic false eyelashes and big bouffant hairstyles, is not merely restricted to the female cast of the BAFTA award-winning television series on our television screens.

Their influence can be seen on the British high street as women the United Kingdom increasingly reject the natural look and have embraced the groomed aesthetic of their on-screen idols. This is evident in the increase of the sale of hairspray, such as L’Oreal Elnett Hairspray which witnessed a fourteen percent increase to £30.2 million, the increase of the sale of self-tanning products, such as Johnson’s Holiday Skin Body Lotion which witnessed a fifty one percent boost in sales, and higher sales of false nails and false eyelashes, which witnessed a forty nine percent and ninety percent increase respectively as women seek to re-create the glamorous aesthetic of the female cast of the Britain’s most watched television series.

Famously dubbed ‘The Only Way Is Essex Effect’, it can most notably be seen on a night out in town all over the United Kingdom, from Sheffield to Portsmouth, where women compete for the biggest bouffant, the most tangoed complexion, the most dramatic false eyelashes and the most perfectly manicured nails.

The effect of reality television in the United Kingdom can also been seen in the adoption of the cast’s vocabulary in the television series in conversations all across the United Kingdom, where the words ‘Jel’, an abbreviation of the word jealousy, ‘glamping’ to refer to glamorous camping and ‘reem’ and ‘salty Potato’ to refer to a sexually attractive female, are used as interchangeably in conversations now as words in The Oxford English Dictionary. ‘The Only Way Is Essex Effect’ is akin to that of ‘The Geordie Shore Effect’, where the Geordie cast’s vocabulary, where the phrases ‘get yer tash on’ to refer to kissing and ‘mortal’ to refer to an individual’s excessive alcohol consumption, is similarly adopted in conversations at a national level.

Only time will tell what the effect of Liverpool-based reality television series Mersey Shore, soon to hit our screens in the next year, will be…