Let me tell you a story. It happened many months ago now, in a bathroom at a pub in inner Sydney on a Friday night. With friends. And no - it’s not that kind of bathroom story.

Standing in front of the mirrors, washing our hands, one of said friends looked curiously as my face, turned to me and asked me if I’d been using the concealer she’d bought me for my birthday a year previously. No, I told her. I had tried it, but it wasn’t really my thing.

She paused, said “okay”, and as we exited the bathroom continued, “You just need it here. And here. And here.”

I suppose I snapped, although this particular friend and I rarely pull punches when we think the other one is being an idiot. “Is there anything else you’d like to change about me?” I asked. “What about my hair?” (It had gone frizzy from walking in the summer wind for 40 minutes from Wynyard to Paddington.) “Do I need to lose 10 kilos?”

At this point, our other friend emerged from the bathroom and said, “Why don’t you just use the concealer? You do look better with make-up, Rach.”

“I am wearing make-up!” I said, exasperatedly. And I was. I just happen to be a human being who walks and talks and moves and eats, and thus who rarely looks like she stepped out of a fashion editorial.

My annoyance sprang less from being criticised (it’s not like I hadn’t noticed I had three tiny pimples on my face) than from the notion that these criticisms actually mattered, that they were something I should be worried about - and that if I wasn’t worried about them, others would worry for me. That unless I went around looking flawless, there was something wrong with me.

Shortly after I arrived in the UK, I read Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls. I was cynical before I read it - most of the people who’ve written about raunch culture post-Ariel Levy have tended towards the hysterical and sensationalist - but as it turns out, the “living dolls” metaphor really spoke to me. It seemed to articulate in a nutshell the kind of self-monitoring that my friends and I - and so many other women, for that matter - engage in.

The stolen glances in every mirror we walk past. The application - and perhaps more pertinently, reapplication - of make-up whenever we look less than perfect. The fact that these two friends in particular would inform me whenever my appearance wasn’t up to scatch (“you should put on more lipstick/mascara/foundation”), and the fact that I would in turn ask them if I needed to make changes to it. De-tagging unflattering photos on Facebook. Posing for photo after photo after photo in order to find one worthy of being uploaded to Facebook.

It’s somewhat embarrassing to write down, and it’s worth noting that - as always - these are incidents selected from an infinite number of moments in order to make a particular point. It is not all we are, and certainly not all I am. But it is a part of me, and I have to wonder if, when I reapply my lipstick as I sit at my desk at work (as - and I’ll be honest - I often do), it’s because in some small way I look at myself as a doll.

Rabbit Write has challenged some of the most interesting female bloggers around to go sans make-up for a week, in order to explore our complicated relationship with cosmetics. She writes:

It’s not about taking a week off  because make-up is somehow bad or because not wearing it is better. It’s that by taking a week off, I should be able to understand my relationship to cosmetics more clearly. Why do I feel I need to sketch on eyebrow pencil before going to the grocery? To shellac my face before seeing a friend? And if I am going to a networking event or party, can I feel comfortable in anything less than contoured cheeks and caked on lashes?

The reason I’m sharing this story with you is because I think it’s even bigger than that. It’s not just a question of wearing make-up versus not wearing make-up, or engaging in beauty work versus not engaging in beauty work. Putting make-up on in the morning isn’t enough - you can’t just “create” your mask in the morning an leave it at that. It’s an act of constant self-observation and maintenance with ever more tasks to be undertaken.

It’s tiring, and it doesn’t acknowledge our humanity and fallibility.

Elsewhere: No Make-Up Week, Rabbit Write