When we’re young, every plan feels like a possibility. Staying at home feels like an omission, as though life is happening without us and we’ve somehow been left off the guest list. We treat our diaries with a huge degree of seriousness, where each empty evening is something to be filled.

And so we go out. Of course we do.

If you close your eyes, you can likely summon it from the recesses of your youth: spitty drizzle settling into the weave of a jacket you bought to impress people you didn’t really like; acoustically hostile bars, where conversation requires the lung capacity of an opera singer and the optimism of someone who hasn’t yet realised they will be screaming ‘what?!’ for the next four hours; queuing in shoes that look promising in the mirror but are not, in fact, designed for walking… There’s sometimes joy in it, but there’s also the reality of numb toes.

Eventually, something shifts. There isn’t a cinematic turning point – no dramatic epiphany in the back of an Uber. It’s a gradual, creeping realisation that going out feels like effort, and the cost-benefit analysis starts to resolve itself pretty quickly. The prospect of being sociable can no longer compete with the appeal of going home and sprawling out on the sofa.

It’s funny how we’ve come to romanticise the idea of staying in as something chosen rather than surrendered to. The difference – we insist – is intention. Good skincare. Posh bed sheets. A hard-to-balance collection of mugs from Anthropologie Home (or Emma Bridgewater, if we’re feeling particularly fancy). Stripped of gentler phrasing, the shift from FOMO (the fear of missing out) to JOMO (the joy of missing out) is what happens when we stop performing for attention.

In our twenties, the restaurant matters because it might be mentioned later. The party matters because it’s part of the image you’re building. Even exhaustion acts as proof that you are wanted and relevant. Then, slowly, the audience disappears, and what remains is far less theatrical: the meal either tastes good or it doesn’t. The conversation either holds or it drifts. The evening either restores you or drains you, and you become unwilling to pretend otherwise.

• • •

There’s a particular ritual that plays out in many homes every evening, and it usually arrives at around 8.15pm. The face is washed. The bra comes off. The phone is set down with a glorious air of finality that would once have felt antisocial. And then, nothing much happens. Which, increasingly, is the point.

Once upon a time, beauty was a battlefield. You didn’t apply a serum, you fought fatigue. Creams didn’t comfort, they corrected. Skin was either problematic or perfect – and nothing in between. The lexicon of beauty marketing carried the bedside manner of a military boot camp: we fight, we target, we tackle, we erase.

Somewhere along the way, marching orders gave way to murmurs; regime softened to ritual, and battle gave way to restorative balm. Scroll through any launch email and you’ll spot them: textures that melt, scents that soothe, and active ingredients that are, God bless them, thoughtful. The trend is toward breathy vowels, gentle fricatives, and a curious allergy to the velar plosive /k/ (in other words, the clipped, commanding consonant at the start of clear, correct, and control).

Linguistically, this is a masterclass in aspirational softness; strength is no longer measured by hard edges or unflinching resolve, but by the comfort we experience in our own skin. The language itself honours a femininity that doesn’t have to perform to be worthy of care. To understand how we reclaimed the right to melt into our rituals, we ought to look back to the era that declared war on the face and turned beauty into bureaucracy…

Beauty as a Civic Duty

From the kohl-rimmed sovereignty of Ancient Egypt to the high-status artifice of the Elizabethan court, beauty was a ritual of power; it was an elective flourish, and – probably – a lot of fun. Eventually, however, the joy of the ritual became industrialised by the drudgery of the rulebook, and by the mid-20th century, the industry had traded creative expression for a sort of aesthetic tax. The female face was reclassified as public infrastructure – a municipal project requiring constant, corrective maintenance.

The mid-century housewife didn’t dab on rouge for the sheer, giddy thrill of it; she did it because ‘letting oneself go’ was a form of social insolvency. Beauty was a civic duty, and woe betide the woman who braved the morning post with the indecency of an unpowdered nose. A made-up complexion was the uniform of respectability – it reassured the neighbours that the domestic machinery was, at the very least, aesthetically sound.

When beauty operates as a mandate, it demands the kind of rigid compliance usually reserved for parade grounds or boarding school dormitories. In the 1950s, the Max Factors and Westmores of the world acted as the architects of this standard, drafting blueprints for a meticulously made-up face that women were expected to maintain as a matter of course. The mirror became a site of surveillance: a vanity-top panopticon where deviation signalled a catastrophic failure of character. It’s worth noting that we don’t interrogate a bare earlobe for signs of a looming nervous breakdown, nor do we read a missing necklace as evidence of moral rot. Yet for an exhausting stretch of the twentieth century, the naked face was treated as a form of visible negligence.

Closing the Department of Correction

Fortunately, as time wore on, women began investing their energies elsewhere, and the rigid ledger of beauty began to loosen. Wellness, education, and financial independence carved out new domains of social legitimacy, and makeup was beginning to lose its social mandate. What replaced it was harder to audit and impossible to standardise: health, autonomy, and self-possession. Even the most public of stages have borne witness to this – Pamela Anderson’s bare-faced turn at the 2025 SAG Awards felt less like a lapse in grooming and more like raising a (manicured) middle finger to the old double standard. It echoed that of Alicia Keys, whose 2016 pivot toward a bare face wasn’t a scorched-earth policy against the cosmetics industry, but a reclamation of her right to opt in. As Keys later clarified, ‘I’m not a slave to makeup. I’m not a slave to not wearing makeup either.’

This feels like the difference between donning a uniform because the night shift demands it and slipping on a string of pearls because, well, why not? One is compliance; the other is good taste. Today’s makeup deities – the Pat McGraths and Lisa Eldridges – are revered precisely because their work is discretionary, even painterly, and not a coat of social primer. We don’t look to them to disappear into a template; we look to them for a way to express ourselves.

So, next time you encounter a launch email that whispers about thoughtful balms and resilient barriers, know that the change in tone is more than just clever marketing. It’s a peace treaty – it signals that the blueprints have been shredded, the drill sergeants have retired to the coast, and the Department of Works has vacated the premises. The moral calculus of the naked face is finally collapsing, the mirror is no longer a site of social policing, and in its place lies hard-won autonomy. We’re experiencing a shift from ‘corrective’ to ‘creative’, where skin is cared for as an investment and makeup is enjoyed as an indulgence. At last, whether we opt for a pink lip, an electric blue eye, or nothing at all, the choice is entirely and gloriously our own.