This was too good not to share in full. The last line had me wondering whether "Turkmenbashi" had not been to Houyhnhnmland.

ASHGABAT (Reuters) - Turkmenistan's authoritarian president, whose recent decrees have included banning gold teeth, has told television presenters to stop wearing make-up because he had difficulty telling the men from the women.

"You put too much make-up on female TV presenters whose faces would be paler without it. Her own, natural color is better," President Saparmurat Niyazov said.

"Sometimes you even put make-up on the lads. Then I really cannot tell the two apart," he said at a meeting with cultural and television representatives shown on state TV on Thursday.

Since post-Soviet independence, Niyazov has cut the gas-rich Central Asian state's ties to the outside world, stamped out dissent, and built up a bizarre personality cult around himself with golden statues and idiosyncratic decrees.

In the footage of Wednesday's meeting Niyazov also expressed a dislike for spitting in public and confiscated three months of wages from a minister whom he blamed for a short-lived hike in sales taxes last week.

Other recent decrees by the president, who calls himself Turkmenbashi the Great (Father of all Turkmen), include the ban on gold teeth, making his book on morality part of the driving test, and opening a leisure center for horses.