Every season, "dramatic makeover day" on "America’s Next Top Model" is like a little gift from heaven for me — oh, the vicarious thrill of watching someone sob as her long, lovely hair is shorn, while one chair over someone with a sleek bob is having 17 feet of extensions woven into her head! The bleach, how it burns!And this year’s lot is even more exciting: Tons of tears, a few troopers (boring!) and one headstrong challenge that’s acceded to (I salute you, A.J.).However, it’s all bittersweet when a girl with one of the sweetest personalities is sent home after an admittedly lousy photo shoot. (Photos to be added Thursday morning, after the CW gets around to posting them on their web site.) I’ll miss you, MEGAN ! I hope your girlfriend loves you with platinum hair as much as I did for 25 minutes.On the positive side of things, I have a new favorite phrase, to replace last week’s. I hope this happens every week!Let’s back up to when we knew Megan was doomed, really, and that’s right after the credits roll and Michelle says, "I love Megan" and begins extolling her virtues — great personality, supportive … which in reality TV means "ill-fated."It’s makeover day! Did I mention it was makeover day? The girls are as excited about it as stupid girls who don’t know what’s coming to them always are. They’re like the horny teenagers who always decide to have sex at Camp Crystal Lake: just asking for it. In fact, at lunch Jaeda tempts fate by announcing, "My hair grows so fast, I don’t care. Shave it!" Well, she won’t get the full Nnenna treatment, but Tyra says she’s getting a spiky little Halle Berry hairdo to accentuate her "boyish qualities," which I think is the nicest way I’ve heard someone refer to the fact she looks like a tranny. However, the folks from Frederic Fekkai — including Frederic himself, who looks very short when standing in line with Tyra and the Jays — will be doing the hacking, so you should feel comfortable, right? Right?!Melrose isn’t too keen on the fact she’ll be going blonde. (And given the past results when Tyra refers to platinum, I would be hesitant, too. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cassandra. And Michelle. And Amanda.) Brooke loves her new dark hair, but I personally think it’s too dark and too much hair for such a tiny face. And, as I predicted early on, Eugena gets the long weave. The twins get same-but-different hair: Michelle’s is oranger and wavy, while Amanda’s is redder and straight. Megan’s pixie is dyed platinum (and looks cute!), CariDee gets more blonde hair and Anchal gets her waist-length hair chopped into layers and her hairline threaded (like tweezing or waxing) so her forehead is now a Tyra Banks fivehead. Megg looks like an idiot with about 50 pounds of hair. Since she is an idiot, she loves it and makes the stupid guitar-jamming motion as evidence.When we first see A.J.’s new color, it’s a weird, somewhere-north-of-chestnut brown that does her no favors, and she says that she’d prefer it be dyed a little darker. Frederic suggests they instead play with the part, but the next time we see her, her hair is indeed darker, albeit not as inky-black as she had to start with. The second color is much better, and you have to give her props for suggesting an improvement, rather than just saying "no way" or "I hate this." And it’s not like the "Top Model" folks are batting a thousand when it comes to suggestions. (Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jayla.)Monique, meanwhile, is upset she’s not getting a dramatic change … and then suddenly we see her upstairs sobbing in the bathroom, bereft — even more upset than poor Jaeda, who took her shearing in relatively good spirits (with a few tears). It turns out nobody’s ever seen her without her current weave, and in a bit of hilarity she explains that she didn’t get a lot of sleep last night because everyone’s alarms kept going off early in the morning, which Jay Manuel misinterprets as "alarm bells are going off in my head."He tells her to sack up, basically, and get her fabulous new hair from Frederic Fekkai. "I am over these girls," he says. And we see A.J. with too many earrings in one ear, looking all smug, at an angle that unfortunately makes her look about as attractive as an early-era k.d. lang. Watch your angles, girl!On to this week’s ludicrous challenge: They go to some building with several floors, and on the ground floor they’ll have 30 seconds to select their skin-flattering shades of Blatant Product Placement makeup. Then they’ll have to jump into the elevator and apply! apply! apply! on the way to another floor, when they’ll have 30 seconds to select clothing. Then back into the elevator to their penultimate stop, which is to select shoes. At the top, they’ll meet a Blatant Product Placement makeup executive — OK, it’s Queen Latifah — and explain how they came up with their Young Queen look.Megg doesn’t even make it into the elevator on the first floor. Monique dallies too long in shoes, which makes several girls say things like "we’re all getting beaten up tonight." Everyone else makes it to the top floor intact, although not looking very much like Young Queens. In fact, I wrote that Brooke looked like she was going to prom, which was prescient since she tells Queen Latifah that her idea was Prom Queen. I, meanwhile, am still wondering which lame stylist picked out these dresses? It looks like the Fairy Godmothers prom dress giveaway pile. Anyway, Eugena wins (because she loads on the color, although her skin still looks awful) and she picks two friends who’ll be in a makeup shoot that runs somewhere online for like two hours.Back home, Monique is indeed in full glorious seething mode, talking to her mom about these "baggedy no-talented models." Melrose needs to use the phone, and this just makes Monique more insistent on staying on the phone longer and longer. A helpful clock shows it’s been more than an hour … then two hours … there’s a shot of her thumbing through Cosmopolitan where it looks like she’s sitting on the toilet, not a phone in sight. Her mom, meanwhile, says something about how if those girls mess with a child of God, there’ll be hell to pay (she doesn’t actually say that last part, but she should have), and then says the most awesome thing of the whole episode: "You tell them, ‘I am a princess of the throne.’" This explains a lot about Monique’s ‘tude — she’s been raised a diva. Can you imagine her at, say, age 8, informing people she’s a princess of the throne? Stupid mom.Then mild-mannered Anchal, of all people, finally loses her cool and hangs up the phone, and there’s lots of fighting and threats and bleeped-out curse words and digitized fingers, and then another awesome shot where Monique has refused to get out of the phone booth, even though we can hear the operator saying, "If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again." She’s in there for 3 HOURS AND 31 MINUTES, until I think everyone else went to bed and didn’t care anymore.The big photo shoot challenge involves crazy hair like the ones seen in competitive hair shows like Hair Wars and in … well, that movie with the late-night talk show guy Craig Ferguson, "The Big Tease," which nobody saw. It’s a great concept that makes for lousy still photos; Jay Manuel says the challenge is, "Does the hair wear you, or do you wear the hair?" Considering that each girl has moving parts attached to her head, you can bet an inanimate object is going to come out on top pretty often.(Click on the each thumbnail to see a full photo.)CariDee’s picture makes her look like Tori Amos times thirty. Michelle looks like a parrot, and everyone else looks, well, pretty silly.Megan reminds me of John Candy’s character in "Spaceballs." Megg, meanwhile, is just fugly.Melrose’s whole photo is pretty awesome, but when it’s cropped to just her face it’s evident that she skated by on the rainbow hair. Anchal’s photo rocks.Get right down to it, and A.J. and Brooke have the same kind of bulbous nose. They’ve made Brooke look pretty damn ugly here. And not even in a jolie/laude sort of way.Amanda’s photo looks awesome, and the photographer commends her for figuring out which angle her hair looks best at. Eugena, on the other hand, won’t take direction and ends up with a "meh" photo.Jaeda doesn’t do too well, either — she can’t give a range of emotion. Monique, well, I can’t even remember anything except she went first. That’s how much we’ve been groomed not to like her.At judging, the worst two are Jaeda and — gulp! — Megan, who when the girls walk in from judging has already assumed the slumped posture of defeat. When it’s announced she’s going home, she just kind of hangs her head a little, like "Yeah, I figured." No tears like last week.Next week, the princess of the throne tells her mother that she might have to "f*#% someone up," and although we don’t hear her mother’s response, I’m pretty sure it’s not that a "child of God" shouldn’t be using that kind of language. And, as I also correctly forecast, Monique is bound to be dangerously crazy, and thus guaranteed to stay on for many, many episodes.

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