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'You're byoo-ti-fu-ull," James Blunt chirps in a pop torture so hideously penetrating that a British radio station gained listeners after vowing never to play the song again. No worries for Blunt, who probably serenades his lady love, Russian model Petra Nemcova, with an a cappella version on their merry way to the bank.

Why has this particular song hit such a chord? Too bad we can't ask the late Estée Lauder, who started out mixing beauty potions above her immigrant father's hardware store and left her sons, when she died at the age of 97, with a $4-billion (U.S.) business.

Her big insight -- and the founding principle of her company -- was that what every woman wants is to feel beautiful (hence the name of the company's No. 1 fragrance, Beautiful). Never mind that she herself was a clever and successful businesswoman, she certainly wasn't so stupid as to name her scent "Brainy" or even "Success."

But the hand-wringing earnest among us keep pretending that if they just click their heels three times and keep repeating that "it's what's on the inside that counts," we will all somehow be transported back to the fashion and beauty equivalent of Kansas.

Last week, in the wake of the Madrid ban on melba-toast thin models on its fashion week catwalk, British Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell called on London Fashion Week to follow suit.

"I applaud the decision taken by Madrid to ban superthin models and urge the organizers of London's Fashion Week to do the same," Jowell said in a statement. "Young girls aspire to look like the catwalk models. When those models are unhealthily underweight, it pressurizes girls to starve themselves to look the same."

Now, in Israel, a place where one might imagine there are more pressing social concerns than anorexia, the charge has been taken up by a fashion photographer who has secured a promise from firms that account for 60 per cent of the country's advertising volume to turn away models with a BMI, or body-mass index, of less than 18 (the usual for models in the country, which also has the fourth-highest rate of anorexia in the industrialized world, is 14).

One can almost hear the eyeballs rolling, and not just among the fashion set -- banning thinness being just as clever and effective an approach to the problem of female self-loathing as banning drugs has been at eradicating their cachet.

Yet the lip service is approaching critical mass. Last weekend, the folks at Dove, whose campaign for "real" beauty features "real" women on billboards in giant white maternity bras and senior citizen's underwear (and is more than somewhat undermined by the fact its parent company, Unilever, also owns Slim-Fast), held its first Mother-Daughter Self-Esteem workshop in Toronto, an effort organized after the release of a global study that found that mothers (27 per cent) were more influential as role models on girls' feelings about beauty and body image than media (19 per cent) and celebrities (10 per cent).

While it is encouraging to hear that maternal opinions might matter more than those of Mischa Barton or Nicole Richie, it is also perplexing to hear that self-esteem is something that can be overhauled in the time it takes for a makeover.

The activity guide for the Self-Esteem workshop, which is designed for preteens and their positive female role models, and will tour 11 other Canadian cities through December (see http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca) reads like those Kotex "what's normal is what's normal for you" pamphlets that they gave us years ago in health class.

Its bubble-gum-pink cover, which naturally features an inclusive rainbow of girls of many colours, reads, "Sometimes I Feel Ugly and Other Truths About Growing Up." Inside, its authors acknowledge, "It may be hard to feel beautiful." To this end, the guide offers various exercises, one of which encourages girls and their mentors to look carefully at their bodies to discover just "how special" and "truly spectacular" they really are, each and every one.

The problem with all this well-intentioned bumf is that it is willfully blind to the cruel reality that even eight-to-12-year-old girls already know all too well. Workshop all we want about how truly beautiful we may be inside, it's still the pretty girls that the teacher likes best and who have the most friends.

Add to that what our girls really learn from their "positive female role models" who are busily hiding their fear of aging with Botox and bemoaning the size of their butt. Interestingly enough, the very same Dove study found that 55 per cent of Canadian women surveyed are unhappy with their body weight (the largest number worldwide), while at the same time, a deluded 72 per cent of us hope we haven't managed to pass on our feelings of self-doubt or insecurity to the next, self-loathing generation.

Following the hoopla over skinny models, one British paper used an image of the swan-like Erin O'Connor on its cover. "The problem with the press," O'Connor told The Guardian, "is that no one is a winner: Thin women are disgusting -- and so are fat women."

Thin, fat -- we all desperately want to be byoo-ti-fu-ul. I, for one, wish we could just cut the crap and stop telling our girls that if only they could see how beautiful they are inside, they will be beautiful to others. In the end, it only perpetuates the inherently tragic and ridiculous idea that for women, how we look is still the only real measure of our worth as human beings.

kvonhahn@globeandmail.com