Whether you are man, woman, child or beast, one thing is certain – buying jeans can be traumatic.

I don’t know the number of times I’ve fallen in love with a pair of jeans I see on a hanger, only to have my heart broken in the change room minutes later.

I find shopping for jeans almost intolerable – sizes vary wildly between stores and brands, colours are never right, styles are confusing, jeggings make me want to vomit and on top of all this, denim is hideously expensive.

Probably the part I hate the most about jeans, is trying them on. I always have this idea in my head of how the jeans are going to look on me, and when it doesn’t work out, I’m crushed. I suspect that the majority of all diets begin in the change rooms of stores selling jeans.

And could the lights in these change rooms be any more unforgiving? Unflattering is an understatement. Here’s a newsflash for all you retailers: if you want me to buy your products, put in lighting that makes my butt look like a peach, not like the backside of a premenstrual hippopotamus.

I don’t want the reality; I want the image I have created in my head. And it’s not just girls that have this problem, I have been shopping with guys for jeans and it’s just as frustrating and depressing for them. They panic about the size of their bottoms, they wonder if the pants are too tight.

And then they leave empty handed. Well, I’ve had enough and on my recent trip OS, I had a sort of denim epiphany. I decided not to care. I wasn’t going to waste my holiday on a desperate and twisted quest to find the perfect pair of jeans. In fact,

I was going to ignore jeans completely and if something good happened to come my way, perhaps I would feign an interest.

Now this isn’t a method I would recommend to anyone – I only reached this point after I’d been on an extreme coffee-fuelled five day shopping bender.

I had tried on one pair of pants (not jeans) and they had fit perfectly, so rather than wasting more of my time queuing to use change rooms, I made a radical decision: I wasn’t going to try on another pair of pants – I was just going to buy them.

I tell you, it was very liberating. If I saw a pair of jeans I liked in my size, I just bought them. No trying on, no unflattering light, no trauma.

I figured if I got home and I hated them or they didn’t fit, I would just donate them to charity.

But guess what – they all fitted me perfectly.

How is this possible, you ask? Because in America they sell pants with a waist measurement and leg measurement.

So people with short little stumpy legs like me, can actually get a pair of pants that fit them properly. Also, sizes seem to be more universal across different stores, so even though I took a pretty serious gamble, in the end it paid off. So, my advice for buying jeans?

Don’t get caught up in the styles and the sizes and the general craziness of it all. If you see a pair of jeans you like the look of, buy them and then take them home and try them on in the comfort of your own home, in front of the mirror that always makes you feel fabulous.

Trust me, you will feel calmer and look better. And there’s no chance you’ll be overcome with the desire to strangle a chirpy sales assistant with a pair of Levi 501s.