Did a man really divorce his wife after seeing her without make-up for the first time?

Various publications are reporting that a man has divorced his new wife after seeing her without make-up for the first time.

Apparently the couple went swimming in the sea in Sharjah, UAE, where her "features changed" after her make-up washed off.

According to Gulf News, he realised that she had also had cosmetic surgery, and was wearing false eyelashes and coloured contacts.

If you think this story sounds familiar it's because a similar one did the rounds in August last year, where it was reported that an Algerian man had supposedly sued his bride for fraud because she "hid her lack of good looks" from him.

Every news outlet that ran the story sourced it from the same place: a second-hand Emirates 24/7 article.

Urban legend debunker site Snopeswas quick to point out that the story bore all the hallmarks of a media hoax:

An unlikely and outlandish news story gleaned second-hand from unspecified foreign news sources, about an event taking place in a part of the world where facts are difficult to verify.

The August 2015 story was confirmed to be a hoax perpetuated by the French-language fake news site El Manchar ['The Stain'], that posted a gleeful tweet about how their "story" had made the list of top news stories for the day.

What is slightly different about this case is that Gulf News claims the psychologist, Dr Abdul Aziz Asaf, told them directly that "the groom immediately divorced his bride and refused any attempt to reuinte them again", not naming her due to client confidentiality,

Anyway, take this one with a healthy dose of scepticism. If the man in question was that shallow, she's probably better off anyway.

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