Eyeliner seems to be the main one. Or "guyliner" as I believe those in the know (ie, not me) are calling it.

But I've also come across nail varnish, foundation, mascara, even lip gloss.

That's without mentioning hair which, everywhere, seems dyed, straightened and sprayed. Then dyed again.

It's a bit like the New Romantic era only, fortunately without Simple Minds or Spandau Ballet.

"Wearing make up is like cooking and contraception," a friend said. "Best left to girls."

And I, not bothered to argue, nodded while wondering where you'd buy a guyliner pen from and how much it'd cost and, come to think of it, when my friends turned into 1950s caricatures.

Truth is I've worn make up pretty much every day since I was 19 anyway – concealer to conceal the scar that scars my nose.

It's my own fault it's there, of course.

One student night I decided to take a short cut home through the dark of an abandoned back garden. Problem was it didn't end up being that short. In fact it added an extra four days and several miles by ambulance on to my journey.

Somewhere in that overgrown tangle of weeds, grass and tree roots and long-deserted barbecue equipment my foot caught something. I went down like a sack of spuds. My pocketed hands didn't have time to catch up. My fall was broken only by my face.

Painful.

Although perhaps not as painful as the wounds sustained by the guy who lay in a hospital bed next to me a few hours later.

"What happened to you?" he asked, spotting the hole where my nose had once been.

"Fell over," I shrugged. "You?"

"My wife stabbed me 14 times," he shrugged back.

I didn't speak to anyone after that.

I wasn't really in a fit state, anyway.

Numbed, I was, from the painkillers being pumped into me while, for half a week, surgeons cut skin from other parts of my body to slowly sew back into a nose-shaped mound on my face.

"Your sense of smell won't ever be what it was," the doctor told me eventually. "But you do have a nose, at least."
An odd coloured one.

Skin on your face is pigmented differently from the rest of your body because it's more exposed to the elements, apparently.

It means I now have a skin-graft scar that's bright red on the front of my face.

"You should use this," said the nurse, offering me a tube of concealer.
And I have done from that day forth.

If only she'd given me some guyliner too.