Last Monday I felt unusually homesick. It happened at the premiere of “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” I expected to be infuriated by watching a Texan play Britain’s much-loved disaster girl. Instead, I was really impressed.

Aside from the occasional waver in her English accent, Renee Zellweger’s portrayal of a disheveled, vodka-slugging Brit took me right back to life at home.

When the guy she wants falls for her “just they way she is,” I admit, I sighed out loud.

And then reality hit.

As I shuffled out of the Ziegfeld, squashed by the New York crowd, I saw the real Zellweger – the way she really is.

Gone was the normal, pretty girl who squeezed into giant support panties to disguise her bum. In her place was a scary, emaciated glamour queen, caked in layers of makeup.

As she teetered in front of the photographers on legs the width of my wrists, I remembered that she was not really Bridget Jones – and that I was in New York.

Here, looking skinny and immaculate is not some idle female fantasy. It’s a full-time manic pressure – which makes me miss Britain.

I often stand in the ladies’ room here, agog at the shiny-haired, glossy-lipped women with perfectly arched eyebrows preening in the mirror – and then catch them looking sniffily at me as if I had been dragged though a hedge backward.

And though I’ve never given two hoots about my slap-dash appearance, their sneers are beginning to get under my skin.

In the five months that I’ve lived in New York, I have lost several pounds and devoted more time and money to personal grooming than I ever have in my life.

I’ve had two manicures (my first ever), two pedicures (my first ever), two eyebrow plucks (my first ever), one hair tint (my first professional coloring), three haircuts and four full-leg waxes.

This may sound like nothing to your average New York chick, but for a girl who usually keeps her nails short with strategic biting, applies self-strip waxes only the night before a vacation and uses lemon juice to lighten her hair – it’s been quite an ordeal. In England, spending lavishly on your appearance is considered terribly vain.

I held out on the eyebrow pluck for almost three months, terrified by the sight of women on the subway with neatly trimmed brows in the shape of tadpoles. Then one afternoon a reformed English friend frog-marched me into Bloomie’s to get me plucked.

“It will change your life!” she called as a fierce Korean women led me away into a cell-like room.

“Please, don’t do anything drastic,” I begged as she ruthlessly massacred my eyebrows with 10,000-degree hot wax.

“Really nothing, nothing off the top, pleease,” I wailed, feeling her deft tweezers attacking hundreds of tiny hairs.

“I give you nice shape!” she snapped finally. And she was right. Still, I spent the rest of the day peering in the mirror hoping no one would notice the change.

When I went to get my hair tinted, the trauma was even worse.

“I’d like something really, really, really subtle – and natural – totally natural,” I insisted to the Arusha Cutler colorist, my face white with fear.

I was about to part with $180, all the while praying my hair would look exactly the same.

While she merrily caked my locks in orange goo, I studied the Upper East Side blondes in the salon, petrified that I’d come out looking just like them.

And when she put my head under a heater to help the die hold, I shrunk away from the heat bars to lessen the effect.

Two hours later I escaped – with my hair looking better than ever – then spent the rest of the day whining at my friends, “Are you sure it doesn’t look too green?”

The first time I had a pedicure, I made a big mistake. I thought the whole thing would only take 15 minutes, and when I arrived for the appointment, I was already running late.

Told to sit for ages in paper slippers, waiting for the varnish to dry, I thought I’d risk it and leg it out the door. But when I took my shoes off later, the varnish had fused to my socks.

I have still managed to avoid the lure of wearing tons of makeup – mainly because I’m terrible at applying it and always end up looking like a child who’s played with her mother’s eye shadow and lipstick.

My minimalist approach hasn’t won me any fans. A recent date was appalled when I told him I take only 10 minutes to get ready for the evening. “What’s your problem?” he said. “Imagine how great you’d look if you bothered to take an hour!”

I will not yield.

I prefer to think of the wise words of another friend. He said women who really cake it on may look fab the night before – but in the morning they can look horribly rough.

At the “Bridget Jones” premiere, there were plenty of those kinds of women around. They were the most glamorous sticks in New York, but they didn’t seem real.

It’s women like them who make me want to go home.