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I touched Amy Winehouse's face, and the skin didn't come off in my hand. This is a testament to the skill of the 20 artists at Madame Tussauds who spent 4½ months crafting a likeness of the singer, inserting one "ethically sourced" strand of human hair at a time and carefully inking the tattoo that lies over her heart to remind the world of the miscreant husband who languishes in a London jail.

Amy Waxhouse is a smooth-skinned, clear-eyed vision in a lemon-bright minidress and black platforms. This is 2007 Amy on the night of her glory at the Brit Awards, a Madame Tussauds representative told reporters who wanted to know why the figurine hardly resembled today's sad, poxy strumpet of Camden.

Winehouse's parents, Mitch and Janis, were at the unveiling (if it's wax, is it an unpeeling?). Her father said that the figurine bore an "incredible" likeness to his daughter, which might be more a poignant testament to paternal devotion than an indication that he can actually see.

Winehouse herself was not there; why would she be when she couldn't be bothered to roll her beehive out of bed for husband Blake Fielder-Civil's criminal sentencing the day before? (He got 27 months for assault and perverting the course of justice for an attack on a barman.)

Amy Waxhouse was mobbed by her fans on Thursday, the day she was unveiled to the public at Madame Tussauds. They hugged her thin shoulders and stroked her many tattoos and - this is the principle activity at the waxworks - took photos with her, thus going home with a simulacrum of a simulacrum. And if you think this is ghoulish and it represents our obsession with celebrity culture, I have three words for you and they're all French: plus ça change.

Madame Tussaud herself (née Marie Grosholtz) was a canny surveyor of celebrity culture. Her waxworks, begun before the French Revolution and later an enormous hit in Victorian London, was the Entertainment Tonight of its day. If you wanted to see Robespierre's death mask or Napoleon's drawers, you went to Madame Tussaud's.

She crafted Robespierre's wax death mask, and Marie Antoinette's and Louis XVI's, after they all had unfortunate meetings with the guillotine. (At least she claimed she did in her memoirs; as Kate Berridge reveals in her wonderful biography, Waxing Mythical, Madame Tussaud found the truth as pliable as her favourite modelling medium.) There's a macabre tableau that survives in her waxworks to this day of Madame Tussaud looking for Marie Antoinette's decapitated head in the Madeleine cemetery. She had been an intimate of the royal family but survived the Terror by proving useful to the new regime: Its enemies' death throes were preserved forever.

She proved just as wily when she moved penniless to England with her wax heads in boxes and realized that the new middle class was starved for diversion. They wanted to get up close with the celebrities of the day - writers, royals, aristocrats, even the odd cleric (the odder the better). Crowds flocked to Madame Tussauds, where, unlike other stuffy museums, fun was encouraged. Patrons could drive Napoleon's carriage, buy a little keepsake, or sit down for tea and a snack. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

"She still suffers from the snob's sneer," writes Berridge in her biography. It's true that Madame Tussauds has got to be the tackiest, least hip attraction in London, but it's still one of the most popular, with more than two million visitors a year paying top dollar to touch Freddie Mercury's chest pelt. (And, I was happy to see on my visit this week, they completely ignored Robert Mugabe. But then, they were ignoring Stephen Hawking and Picasso too.)

The principles that kept Marie Tussaud in business - blanket advertising, recognizing which celebrities are as stale as yesterday's toast and which are still newsworthy - prevail today. The London Tussauds recently held a vote to see whether its patrons wanted to encounter Gordon Brown; 83 per cent voted no, and now poor Gordon, to add to his other woes, is the only British Prime Minister not to get waxed. When the new Berlin Tussauds opened recently, it controversially featured a Hitler figure, which was promptly beheaded by a protester. Now that's voting with your fists.

The process for creating the figures hasn't changed much since Madame's day: a multipiece mould of the head is filled with molten wax, and when that's set, acrylic eyeballs are placed from inside the head (they're matched to the sitter's colour and finished with tiny red veins, which vary depending on gin intake). The hair is inserted strand by strand using a special tool, and the skin is tinted with oil paints. Everyone's zit- and scar-free in the land of wax.

Many celebrities choose to sit for live modelling sessions, perhaps to ensure that no unsightly wart hairs or third nipples appear in the finished product. Amy Winehouse didn't - one of the tabloids reported her saying, "I thought you had to be dead almost before they made a waxwork of you." So the sculptors relied on photographs instead, and the throngs gathered around her figurine didn't seem to notice a lack of verisimilitude. They were just happy to have a brush with almost-fame.

The next time a sanctimonious friend starts banging on about our obsession with celebrity culture, tell them it was ever thus, and suggest a trip to Madame Tussauds. You can stop and see Amy Waxhouse, which is infinitely less painful than viewing her in the flesh. This one may not have the talent or the spirit, but at least it's not melting before our eyes.