
Above: one of eight not-scary photos of Amy Winehouse known to exist
There's no doubt that Amy Winehouse is a powerhouse of musical talent.
And I'm not here to judge her extracurricular activities -- who among us hasn't had a wee nip of the sauce now and then? Or a tiny bump or two of the booger-sugar? Or the occasional 4-day weekend spent shakily holding a flame under a broken lightbulb?
I'm not even going to stoop to calling her ugly, even though she's been compared to a mesmerized chicken and a monkey pig in the comments of this very blog. In fact, I thought she was pretty damn sexy when I first saw her, in the video for You Know I'm No Good. She certainly wasn't what you'd call classically beautiful -- I'm sure those hair and makeup artists didn't come cheap -- and a large part of her sex appeal was that throaty, soulful voice. Still, apparently she could be made very photographable, to say the least, (see above) without slaughtering a goat in the name of Beelzebub.
Sure, Allure magazine is probably not going to offer Ms. Winehouse the position of Health & Beauty editor any time soon, but hey, plenty of supermodels have their bad days, too, when they're off the runway, picking up cigarettes and Diet Coke in their baby food-stained sweats. It's just that the paparazzi don't seem to publish those images -- or the less-than-perfect images of any other person on the planet, really -- with the frequency or enthusiasm of bad Amy Winehouse pics.
It's kind of a chicken/egg thing really -- were there always these sorts of bedheaded, makeup-smeared mornings (okay, late afternoons, probably) occurring before she was famous, and it's just that they weren't documented by swarms of omnipresent paparazzi trying to one-up each other? Or is Amy Winehouse truly getting more and more scary looking?
But whatever. Let the hand-wringing pseudo-psychologists who fart out celebrity gossip show sound bites figure that shit out. All theories of causation aside, the fact remains, for whatever reason: there are a hell of a lot of scary-as-fuck photos of Amy Winehouse out there. Here are some of the scariest -- brace yourself.