A bit of French polish on nature's gifts The truth is that, yes, as a rule, we dress any old how. Those alluring highlights in our hair come from a bottle. Far from having an exotic sex life and the lingerie to go with it, we own as many cotton knickers as your average M&S customer. And Picard Surgelés, those heavenly supermarkets where you can buy yummy, readymade frozen dinners, is our BFF. So how do we do it? We French are drilled from infancy by our mothers on how to make the best of what we've got. We feel we have an obligation to look nice, but we see it as simply doing ourselves justice. Every Frenchwoman is a Kissinger-like realist. Unless we happen to have porcelain skin and the kind of legs that look coltish in a pair of hobnailed Dr Martens, we leave the excesses of punk and goth to cutting-edge English fashionistas (so tiresome...). Our aim is to showcase our best features with what we have: we never, ever forget the bigger picture. Every time we pick an outfit for the day, we ask ourselves one thing only: does this help me? Certainly, we know how to look thinner than our British and American sisters. On stark national averages alone, we are in trimmer shape to start with. Part of this is a way of life: scratch the most sophisticated Parisian and you'll find peasant roots. We still have a relatively natural relationship with vegetables, even if we now buy them in ready-to-steam packets. We mix our own vinaigrette. We can slave over a hot stove to prepare our mothers" favourite recipes, even if we don't have the time during the week. As for diets, of course we follow them but we prefer to move those extra carbs discreetly around our plate in silence, rather than embark on a boring evangelical bout of public calorie-counting. It may be, as Madame Figaro reports, that we spend just a fifth of what American women spend on lingerie: instead of a dozen Victoria's Secret numbers, we only own one or two truly good La Perla matching sets. But these are kept in impeccable shape, washed by hand in flaked soap and cold water, ready for the right occasion. Discretion is at the heart of most of a Frenchwoman's secrets. Only our very dearest friend will know our hairdresser's phone number, the address of our cherished secondhand Issey Miyake shop, or the little trick required to turn out a perfect gâteau au chocolat. My own grandmother, when asked for her much-begged personal recipe, used to omit the crucial point that you had to bake it in a bain-marie to keep the result from being too dry. French women are brought up to believe that their mystique should be like the engine of a Rolls-Royce Corniche - hidden from view at all times.