“Cosmetics are not going to be a mere prosaic remedy for age or plainness, but all ladies and girls will come to love them … Artifice, sweetest exile, is come into her kingdom.”

When Oscar Wilde or anyone in his circle speaks on society, everyone listens. Being wittingly prophetic seems to have been the only qualification Wilde looked for in the dandies around him. Max Beerbohm, essayist and drama critic, clearly met the cut-off, if the line above is to be believed.

A sesquicentury later, girls as young as ten, refusing to step out to school without a layer of makeup to hide their skin imperfections, are proving the Maximilian adage correct. Feminist mothers are hapless against this assertion of free will by pre-pubescent young ladies who have already mastered the emancipation vocabulary quite admirably.

How does one even get to the essence of the aesthetic debate about beauty and worth and virtue when the rubrics are already decided by performativeness? In a grotesque parody of Charles Baudelaire’s ideas on the job of makeup and other artifice as serving beauty, we are seeing an........

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