In a world where beauty is a highly covetable commodity, is there a sweet spot between minimal effort and obsessive vanity? India Knight has advice on how to make looking good a pleasure, not a chore
THERE IS A PART OF ME – QUITE AN INSISTENT part – that wants to wash her face in the morning, slap on some sunblock and be done with it. It’s the same part that, in a parallel universe, has stopped colouring her hair and wears utility clothing. This version of me intensely dislikes, and maybe even disapproves of, excessive vanity. It comes hurtling to the fore when I watch certain beauty influencers on TikTok. It isn’t just the outlandish amount of make-up they all trowel on, but also the fact that they’re so young. They start off with a bare face and you can see the pertness in their skin, the gorgeous peachy bloom that they will spend the coming decades trying to recapture. They look beautiful. ‘Leave your face alone,’ I mutter at my phone. Then, as the videos progress: ‘OK, fine, that’s nice’, and next, ‘Lovely. Stop there’. But they never do. And that’s the point at which I go all intransigent and think, every single time, ‘Oh my God. How is it possible to be so vain?’
I am averagely vain myself, and yet vanity, my own included, makes me uncomfortable. I’m 57, of a generation for which the idea of being considered massively vain – let alone earning a lucrative living from filming yourself being massively vain in public – would have been the most cringe-making thing imaginable. When did vanity become a commodity? Of course, beauty has always involved artifice, and of course we knew how to scrub up nicely when we needed to, but I think we also instinctively understood something pretty basic about the intersection between vanity and insecurity. ‘She is covered in make-up,’ we’d say scathingly of some poor girl – not because we necessarily disliked the make-up, but because we were conscious of the pathos of hiding beneath quite so much of it, of the desire for reinvention literally having been painted on. We were all insecure young women in one way or another, but to broadcast that fact by wearing a mask of make-up felt embarrassing. (Make-up meant different things, too. I was 15 in 1980, a decade in which it was worn less for prettiness than to semaphore edginess as your underage self tried to blag her way into a club, or, later, to demonstrate power and competence, similar to a shoulder pad or a stiletto heel.)
I think that beauty, like so much else, has become binary: you’re either obsessed or too confused to keep up. So, what interests me now is the intersection between vanity and straightforward maintenance. That seems a manageable place to be: not giving up entirely, but not obsessing so crazily that you end up feeling permanently dissatisfied with how you look. Like it or not, we are are all vain to some degr
