Passengers 3

Across the aisle from me, is a woman with the flawless complexion of a terracotta warrior. Same burnt orange colour, same featureless, uniform texture. She looks plastered, rather than made-up. To relieve the monotony of hue, her lips are picked out in a subtle shade of neon pink. Her dyed hair is a strange purply-red colour, a little too short for the artful piling she has attempted, varnished with a stupendous amount of hairspray and buttressed with an assortment of hair grips the size of girders. For good measure, a large, green, silk orchid is glued to one side of her head. Her black uniform bulges in all the wrong places, and she stares vacantly into space. On her shirt is the name of her workplace, a beauty salon. You too could look like her, it says.