Boy George on how wearing makeup helped him meet men & why he refuses to go under the knife

I can’t sit here now and say I had a mission. The makeup thing for me started because I’ve got a very plain face – nice eyes, but a plain face – and once I started playing around with makeup I realized I could look like a totally different person. Suddenly I was very pretty, and the boys bought me drinks.

A lot of my friends back then would come out at night dressed up and then they’d have normal jobs. When they saw me coming down the street in the middle of the afternoon like Carmen Miranda, they used to dive into shops to avoid me. At least until I got famous. Then it was, ‘George! Let’s get a coffee!’

I look at some of my contemporaries and I think, Why have you never slapped on some foundation? Newsreaders wear it. Donald Trump wears it. [David] Bowie always wore it when he was older.

I joke all the time that I’m gonna be the only person left with their own face. Every single time I go out, someone comes up to me and says, ‘Your skin’s amazing. What do you use?’ I say, ‘Nothing’. They say, ‘You’re lying. You’ve obviously had Botox’. But I have never, ever had it. Never.

It’s taken me years to get to a place where I can look in the mirror as George O’Dowd and say, ‘You’re quite a handsome man’. But I’m not making judgments about what other people want to do.
Boy George, 62, speaking to Stuff about the perks of wearing makeup for most of his adult life and why he hasn’t had any cosmetic surgery yet.