“Why,” she said, with the kind of withering scorn that flows freely through the veins of a certain type of girl when at adolescence, “are YOU bothering?”

I put down the lipgloss that I was attempting to apply, standing next to her at the toilet sink before the school disco, and slunk away. It was the final confirmation of a message that I had been hearing for some time already – from frenemies and from a family that considered anything more than a weekly hair wash and scrubdown with carbolic as dangerous decadence – that make-up (and fancy unguents, and all the tempting, luscious rest of it) weren’t for the likes of me.

Why not? There are many reasons. First of all – and your mileage may vary, but I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some variant of this going on in all of our teenage years – there was a strict social allocation of the right to make-up; it was only to be used by those who were already attractive. And I wasn’t. It was for those who already were – or who were clearly going to be – sexy. And I wasn’t.

It was an award, of sorts – an informal recognition that you had, genetically speaking, passed some sort of test of femininity and earned the key to the armoury of stores with which to weaponise it. The unspoken logic seemed to be that there was no point wasting it on those who were never going to be able to shoot straight.

“Make-up isn’t trivial – and nor are we who love it”