I salute Dolly Parton’s beauty routine – no one sees me without my make-up

Dolly Parton has come clean – that is, really rather dirty – and revealed that she has been sleeping in a full face of make-up since the 1980s, “partly because of the earthquakes” – “partly because of the earthquakes” being my new favourite excuse for everything.

In her hot-off-the-press tome, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, the singer, 77, writes: “I’m not heading out on the streets without make-up in case there are cameras out there! I’m going to be ready to go!” She does the same thing back home in Tennessee because “I don’t want to go to bed looking like a hag with Carl” (Carl Dean, her husband). All in, she confirms that the world will only see her bare-faced when she is dead.

The Dollster – surely she’s now St Dolly? – and her obsession with the cosmetic arts are a joke she’s very much in on. Yet many women, and some chaps, will be experiencing a #hardrelate. In my own case, I actually rather enjoy removing the stuff at night for that ritualistic, clean-slated feeling. However, at 52, I’ve sported a full face every day since the age of 11. Now I think about it, this coincided with my periods kicking off. Was there an implicit: “I’ve got the crap that goes with being a woman, I may as well enjoy the fun part?” Either way, four decades on, both are still with me.

Unlike Dean, my partner of nine years sees me without lipstick, powder and paint, although I’d probably leave it on were I to take a lover. I’ll let you know. However, my devotion is such that I sport slap to answer the door, venture into the garden, do the bins, and (invisibly) appear on the radio. And not some “touch of this” and “stroke of that” affair, but The Works. Oh, and scent – I’m always perfumed – because what am I, an animal? At Oxford, living in college, I slept in dread of nocturnal fire alarms the way Dolly fears quakes, not wanting to expose myself unmasked and thus unarmoured.

Even in the heavily daubed Eighties, my slap pash was perceived as anti-intellectual, anti-feminist; blue stockings incompatible with blue eyeliner. A chemistry teacher at my grammar school scoffed that cosmetics were never going to earn me a crust. In fact, the most I have ever been paid was to name lipstick shades – the make-up artist working with us receiving my day rate per hour.

In my twenties, as a junior academic, my face-painting was seen as trivial, eccentric, a distraction. In my thirties, I acquired a cosmetic column while based in the “brainy” editorial department of a broadsheet newspaper. A female economics editor decreed that this marked the end of my being taken seriously, happy for my male peers to take on side hustles in wine, sport and cars.

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She and everyone else perceived boys’ toys as big business, beauty as a ghetto for the girls and the gays. This despite Britain’s grooming industry generating £24.5bn in 2022 (down from £27.2bn pre-pandemic), putting it in the same bracket as the car trade. Still, like fashion, beauty must be belittled for the fact that women enjoy it.

And yet, ornamentation rituals are the mark of a civilised society. Indeed, there’s an argument that it was ornamentation that gave us our civilised society, Homo sapiens advancing over its rivals by bonding over self-adornment. Face decoration is a joy as it is an art: without this daily theatre, life would feel intolerably mundane. I have never felt oppressed by my cosmetic compulsion. Instead, I pity the men and women who consider themselves obliged to occupy a bland, relentlessly realist, drably conformist world.

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Those who do see me sans slap tell me I look younger without it. But I don’t want to look young: I want to look fabulous, fascinatingly augmented, recognisable to my (constructed) self. I’m not saying my devotion to Guerlain and Glossier makes me akin to postmodern performance artist Orlan, whose “carnal art” saw her transform herself into canonical artworks in a feminist “struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA and God!” OK, I am. Despite being a froth-mouthed feminist, I am no less a fuchsia-lipped female homovestite – a woman who gets a kick out of the performance of femininity.

If and when I reach Dolly’s vintage, I’ll still be trowelling it on. And, country and western gods willing, I’ll have a 102-year-old living doll as my slap-spiration.