33-year-old Tess O’Reily from Carrick-on-Suir, Co. Tipperary, may not be as well known in Ireland as the likes of Rosanna Davison or Roz Purcell, but she made her name for herself as a glamour model in the UK, posing for a variety of men’s interest magazines. And in an interview with Sunday Independent’s Life magazine today, Tess revealed how the job wasn’t all the glamour that people might make it out to be.
Tess revealed that when she first started out in the business, she was quite naive, and got into awkward situations. “My first shoot was for a car magazine,” she revealed. “The guy who introduced me to the photographer was really weird; it was a real eye-opener to the scene, what people will try to do.”
Worse was to follow when she was travelling to do another shoot, and the ‘organiser’ booked just one hotel room for the pair of them! “I managed to escape when he asked our taxi to stop so he could buy cigarettes,” Tess revealed. “I explained the situation to the taxi driver, and he sped off and dropped me to my friend’s house.”
Tess’s most frightening experience, however, did not come at the hands of a man, but rather a fellow woman. “I was glassed and attacked by girls before for absolutely no reason,” she told the magazine. “Someone just decided they didn’t like the look of me. You have to put up with a lot of abuse in modelling and it’s a shame, because if people just talked to us, they’d see we’re really normal people, even if they don’t like our job.”