Taking a shine to wealthy women passes time over the canapes

A close personal friend, Lou, who lives in Brighton, England, one of my 346 Facebook friends, posted an intriguing question last Friday: why do very wealthy women always look shiny?

I had glibly thrown my own ideas on this into the Facebook ring, suggesting that women who have become wealthy through sheer hard work, enormous dedication towards bettering others' lives, a love of Jesus and the ability to maintain a productive worm farm have The Glow Of Reward, a glow which makes them shiny. But there was far more to this issue than that, and pretty much all of last weekend was consumed thrashing this bad boy out.

Lou herself is not wealthy. Neither is she shiny, though this may have come about after much deep sea diving in Fiji before she came to Dunedin in the early 1990s, possibly scraping herself on coral and brushing against fish with abrasive fins. Or maybe this was just a brief, fleeting and atypically catty observation from a woman disturbed by what she saw in the bathroom mirror one dull and shineless morning.

No, I suspect this is an important question. I have noticed it coming up more and more during prestigious dinner parties, sometimes sucking up hours of intense debate usually reserved for house prices. Indeed, next week we are going to a prestigious dinner party which has been themed on the very topic of shiny wealthy women. The hostess is rich beyond the powers of human description, the host one of the laziest and poverty-soaked men alive. It will be the finest of nights.

The WikiHow website says wealthy women should have shiny hair. I sometimes have shiny hair, but this is because I buy green bottles of Fructus conditioner instead of green bottles of Fructus shampoo, the identifying labels being just too small for me to discern. A friend told me the conditioners are always upside down in the supermarkets, but I am almost certain she was taking the piss.

My people in the beauty and couture industry think the wealthy-shiny theory definitely has legs, a function not only of money to buy expensive facial and skin products, but of time to let the processes do their work.

One spoke to me of a lasering procedure which produces a shininess you could skate on, but only after lengthy intermediary stages of scabs forming and then slowly falling off, something the near-penniless artisan rarely has time for when she sleeps through the alarm at six in the morning and has only minutes to get to her cleaning job.

Another one of my people, drawing hungrily on her third cigarette and second coffee, felt that wealthy women shine because they always travel overseas in midwinter. They come back all tanned and shiny. She said it's disgusting. There is, however, considerable scientific evidence working against this theory.

Look no further than the authoritative website CeleBitch, where Nicole Kidman admitted recently she is terrified of the sun.

When she had to work in Maui with Adam Sandler on Just Go With It, she died a thousand deaths trying to protect her fair skin with SPF 100.

Nicole Kidman is nevertheless quite shiny. Joan Collins is very shiny and very wealthy, and she claims to have never spent a single moment in the sun. Joan Collins is 96 and still very easy on the eye. You can see how this thing really can take a grip on prestigious dinner parties.

The richest woman in the world right now is Christy Ruth Walton, who is worth $22 billion. The fact that there are 11 men wealthier than her is another story for another time. Christy Ruth Walton is talcum powder pleasant, but not shiny.

The jury is still out. But we should keep the discussion ticking over. Whenever you see a shiny woman in the street, ask her if she has heaps of spare cash. The wealthy ones won't reply, and then you'll know.

• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.