Unintended consequences department: Britney Spears is, under the makeup and clothes and hair, a very plain-looking girl. There’s nothing special about her body, and her face is bland.

Britney’s got very good stylists, though, and the combination of their skill and her twenty years of age allows her (them) to usually pull it off rather convincingly. When the stylists’ mission is anything other than Make This Plain Girl Look Sexy, though (e.g., Make This Plain Girl Look Like Someone In The 1950s), the plainness really starts to show.

Here are a couple of pictures of Ms. Spears dressed and made-up as her “Britney Spears” character, complete with pants down to there, tousled hair, lots of shiny, lots of leather, and heavy eye make-up:

We at Tinotopia are not big Britney Spears fans. The music released under her name is simply awful, and, as we’ve mentioned above, there’s nothing so arresting about her looks that we’re willing to forgive that. But we must say that she looks good here, as both down-home Britney and down-town Britney.

These pictures, taken from Pepsi’s Superbowl ad, don’t show “Britney”, though, they show some random girl:

In the first photo, Britney looks like some random girl who’s wearing a bra and sweater that don’t fit quite right; and her adms looks fat. She doesn’t look bad, certainly, but not how Britney needs to look. Tino doesn’t look bad, but then he doesn’t make million of dollars from his looks. Yet.

In the second Pepsi shot, she looks, well, strange. Wig, glasses, and an odd dress. Is this meant to be a comment on the fleeting nature of image-based pop stardom? Nobody would remember the actual Supremes if all they were famous for was dressing like that.

Lessons to be learned:

1. You can increase traffic to your website by including the words “Britney Spears” somewhere on the page. It might not be high-quality traffic, though;
2. Celebrities whose fame is based largely on the ministrations of talented stylists and on a wardrobe full of leather should tread carefully when attempting anything that trades on melding their own image with anything else.