For Nigella Lawson, make-up is Sixties make-up, not least because she learnt how to apply it by watching her mother

Beauty Director: Nigella Lawson

Photography: Matthew Shave

Make-up: Tricia Woolston

My whole notion of beauty, of glamour – of femininity I suppose – stems from the memory of watching my mother at her kidney-shaped dressing table putting her make-up on when I was a little girl. It was like being at the cinema in the dark, watching a film star. The film star can’t see you, but you are there, held absorbed: it’s wonderment.

My mother wasn’t chatty or companionable as she made herself up to go out, but that wasn’t unfriendliness, it was absorption in the task – an absorption I shared not least because watching my mother get ready to leave the familial surroundings of home and her role as a mother to go out in the evening a beautiful woman (and a young woman at that: I can remember her putting her make-up on to go out for dinner to celebrate her 26th birthday) was like catching a glimpse of the grown-up world. It all shimmered for me with excitement and glamour.

I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I wanted to stay an observer, trapped in the magic of it. There’s a face people put on when they apply make-up that is so intensely private that makes watching it – even to a small child – seem like an illicit thrill. Even watching her rub Vaseline into her elbows – part of the ritual – seemed glamorous, full of mystique. I can still remember the smell of her crème rinse (this was the world pre-conditioner) and the Johnson’s Baby Lotion she’d rub on: it is more exotic to me than all the perfumes of Araby.

Nigella Lawson's Sixties make-up