THE latest look from the catwalk is bad news for women with Brooke Shields-type eyebrows. Fashion dictates that fine arches and practically non-existent eyebrows are the new style, marking the return of the eyebrow pencil and the dreaded tweezers.

'Do not judge a person unless you have talked to them one on one.' Michael Jackson's injunction, delivered in the course of his conversation with Oprah Winfrey (BBC 2) gave the casual watcher some problems. If you were watching this, his first television interview for 14 years, did that count as a proxy one on one? Could we take these overheard remarks as being in some way revelatory? Or do you have to pitch up at the Santa Ynez ranch in person before it is legitimate to pass comment? As the conditions of entry are a little restrictive (you have to be Elizabeth Taylor, a llama, Brooke Shields, a top-rating talk show host or a child suffering from cancer), most will have settled for adjusting their prejudices on the basis of this 90-minute special, perhaps the longest piece of spin- doctoring in the history of modern broadcasting.

IT WAS an embarrassing question to ask anyone, let alone the painfully shy Michael Jackson, but Oprah Winfrey finally managed to get to the bottom of an issue that has mystified millions of fans and generated countless yards of speculative newsprint. Why was his skin getting so much lighter? And then the rabbit-punch: was he turning white because he did not like being black?

Denim comes of age this season. British designers are breathing new life into a classic fabric, expanding the boundaries of the possible in the best traditions of British fashion design.

One of the last great beauty credos of the Eighties is crumbling. The luxuriant eyebrow that every beauty editor and make-up artist held sacrosanct for an entire decade (the same one that was supposed to be absolutely essential to the architecture of any face) is being plucked and pencilled into an emaciated shadow of its former self.