For the last two months I haven’t worn makeup, and it’s been harder to give up than smoking, drinking and coffee put together. It started, like many great revolutions, with conjunctivitis, but after not wearing makeup for two weeks while my eyes got better, I just stopped bothering. To my surprise, people have been markedly nicer to me. I have found that when I look made up on the outside – whether it’s in a social situation, at work, at an external meeting – people presume I’m made up on the inside. But when I’m not wearing any, and when my face shows exactly how tired or run down I really am, a barrier I never knew existed comes down and people are just, well, nicer to me. One Poll noted in their survey that many women received comments about looking “tired or ill” when they weren’t wearing makeup. My own mother consistently asks me if I’m ill when I’m not wearing makeup. It’s curious. Maybe looking ill is the opposite of looking like you’re having an orgasm? “She doesn’t look like she’s having an orgasm, she must be ill!” After wearing makeup for the best part of 15 years, it’s strange realising I don’t actually look anything like I thought I did. Like looking in the mirror when you’re really drunk and thinking, “Eh? That’s not what I look like. Is it? Shit, it is.” Except sober. As an Egyptian woman, I’ve always considered excess kohl to be something of a birthright. To this day, I feel totally naked without it – like Neo from The Matrix when he gets reborn into the real world and he’s all slimy and pale with no eyelashes or hair. When I was 15, I ran away to Alton Towers with my boyfriend, whose god-given name was Robbie Williams. It was the first full night we’d spent together as a couple, which was a big deal back then. And the thought of my eyes being naked in front of Robbie Williams was much more terrifying than the thought of my body being naked. I was one more painfully self-conscious teenage girl freshly out of braces and barely into contact lenses and I had all the confidence of a snail. So I took off my makeup, dramatically, like a striptease, in the mirror of the hotel room in front of Robbie Williams, seriously expecting to be dumped the next day on the Banana Boat. As it happened, I dumped him, after an adulterous trip to Center Parcs a few weeks later. And then submitted an intense body of poems to my school magazine about the inextricable link between taking my makeup off and realising I didn’t love my boyfriend. One poem included a line I felt was nothing short of profound at the time: “eyeliner is my weapon of sex.” And yes, it was published and sent to the whole school and all parents. I’ve relied on makeup all my life, in the way people rely on alcohol: to give me a confidence that I don’t naturally have. And I don’t know if it’s because of Alicia Keys, or Kim Kardashian (probably Uma Thurman) or the fact that I’m nearly 30 and a lot more confident than I used to be, but I just don’t think makeup is that cool anymore. Either it’s going out of fashion, or I am. Now, if I’m very made up at anything other than a red carpet event, I feel try-hard, uncalled for, and I feel the women wearing no makeup, or barely any, looking at me like I’ve tried too hard. Will 2017 be the year women give up makeup? Of course not, I'm about to put some on. I think it looks lovely on me and lovely on other people, especially men. But if Kim Kardashian is anything to go by, we might be seeing less of it, and that might be a positive thing.