I’ve always been interested in words and their underlying energy, and when I would hear that phrase – natural beauty – it made me curious. I understood its implication: innate effortlessness and admiration that’s won and worn as a birthright, but what was its counterpart? She’s an artificial beauty? It doesn’t really have the same ring, even though it more closely aligns and reflects the culture: throughout our history on this planet, we have cultivated our image. For many, this is a form of self-expression. And sometimes this comes from an expectation – overt or unspoken – that we should attempt to capture the attention and approval of the ‘other’.

There was a period of history – a long period – when the practice of beauty was not about subterfuge or concealment or trying to make people think “you were born with it.” It was about adornment, decorating and painting your face – much like you would a canvas. The etymology of artificial comes from artifice: ars (art) + facere (to make) in Latin. For millennia, women treated themselves as pieces of art to be presented to the world. It intentionally and visibly required fabrication and construction, making the finished product a mask entirely distinct from the person harboured inside. It was performance, theatre, transformation.

In the late 19th century, Queen Victoria decried makeup as base and vulgar, and made it the provenance of prostitutes and actors shifting the focus to purity and goodness. This drove the practice of beauty underground and sent it into the cultural shadow: suddenly, your appearance – ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’ – became a reflection of your morals, an external expression of whether you were good inside. The spiritual dressing mostly had sexual implications for girls: were you sexually licentious and depraved, or were you an intact and pure virgin? I was shocked and yet not surprised to learn that the field of dermatology grew out of the study of venereal diseases.

As professor Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes in The Body Project, “Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a continuous movement of physicians back and forth between syphilology and dermatology. …Dr. Bulkley, for example, was ‘physician for skin and venereal diseases’ in the outpatient department at New York Hospital; another New York City doctor, Prince Morrow, actually called himself a ‘dermatovenereologist.’ Because of the connection between sexual disease and skin lesions, sexual behaviour was implicated as a cause of adolescent acne – known clinically as acne vulgaris, but also as acne adolescentium.” You can imagine the horror and panic of puberty.

Over time, our science matured, standards evolved and cosmetics moved back into the mainstream, commercialised and popularised by our first mass media: Hollywood makeup artist Max Factor – who transformed the faces of screen sirens like Jean Harlow, Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich – created the first product line for the market (he also coined the term makeup; interestingly, they sold it as ‘society make-up’). This included foundation, lip gloss, cream powder, wand mascara and ‘Erace’, a revolutionary concealer on a stick that came out in 1954. Wisely, Max Factor explained, “You are not born glamourous. Glamour is created.”

Etymologically, glamour shares its root with magic and enchantment, which aligns with the words that emerged to describe the beauties of the day: knockout, bombshell, stunning, femme fatale. The suggestion? That beautiful women are dangerous weapons who can bring men to their knees. This is important because it established beauty as our primary, maybe only, currency: the only cultural power we could wield came from compelling men to pay attention to us because we had glamourised them.

This is arguably also why beauty is one of the turfs on which we tussle about feminism – and what it means to be a woman who stands for other women, rather than a woman who participates in patriarchal norms and perpetuates our collective oppression. We know how these conversations went: You’re doing it for the man. We need to be liberated from the male gaze. We understand the concern. When beauty becomes the primary way we experience our value in the world – specifically by turning us into objects to be appraised and rated by more powerful men – it’s not good for any of us. And because of this, because it became hard to be a good feminist and love your mascara and lip gloss, beauty and its cultivation went back into the cultural shadow.

We have long struggled to accept the human urge to play, adorn, decorate and self-express without automatically assuming that these could never be actions to please oneself – only ever undertaken to please an audience of guys.

To be beautiful without external intervention, without effort, ironically requires…a lot of effort. You needed to look low-maintenance and natural, so that nobody could accuse you of prioritising the opinion of other people or spending your energy on something superficial like your appearance. Strong women aren’t supposed to care.

In response to this rule, beauty entwined itself with wellness, using the veneer of health as a trojan horse for its expression: suddenly, your appearance came to reflect how well you took care of yourself, and nobody could be chastised for caring about their health. You could earn a glowing complexion by balancing your gut microbiome and absenting all toxins. This isn’t wrong – we know so much more about the impacts of diet, stress, hormones, harsh ingredients and environment toxins on our skin and health than we used to – but it’s certainly reductive. And it’s harmful when we’re pushed to make the calculus look like it’s that simple: that a good night’s rest solves everything or that we’re not susceptible to the same forces of ageing as everyone else when we’re really undergoing a host of procedures and interventions to look so effortlessly beautiful.

Deep plane facelifts, brow lifts, laser resurfacing, chemical peels, and so on, are all quietly undertaken, while we simultaneously profess to each other that we just eat a well-balanced diet, exercise and drink a lot of water. It’s the same sleight of hand of our forebears – a fabrication of self – but instead of it being overt face painting, its brushstrokes are hidden.

The peace with beauty that we need to broker is right in front of us: we have a biological drive toward the cultivation of the self, a desire to play and express ourselves and a need to both attract and be attracted. It’s how we propagate our species and survive. Here’s a fascinating fact about attraction: in studies, the faces rated most ‘attractive’ – across cultures and races – are actually aggregates, where scientists blend dozens of faces into one. They believe that it’s because this aggregate is perceived by our eyes as most ‘human,’ though another way to think about it is that this face is the most average. Perhaps this explains the drive – at least digitally – to Facetune and filter ourselves until we’re largely indistinguishable from each other.

This makes me sad, though I feel renewed hope when I remember that beautiful and attractive are not synonymous. If anything, beauty is something that relies on its singularity: it’s a highly individual, animated quality that ironically evades objective definition. There are no agreed-upon criteria. Meanwhile, seeking and venerating beauty is arguably one of the most meaningful parts of being human: we look for it in our sunsets, our sculptures and each other’s faces. Beauty – natural or man-made – is a unique and individual experience, a type of vibrational matchstick that you strike when you’re fully present in yourself and lit from within. That can’t be cultivated or contrived. Beauty is when you’re the subject, in the object. It’s my mother, and you, and me, when we’re fully animated and showing up in the world just as we’re meant to be.