Though undoubtedly something of a spectacle, the act of applying perfume is usually better done at a tactful distance from others. Spritzing your signature scent in the office or a packed cocktail bar is at best eccentric, at worst anti-social.

This month, we launched a long-awaited new product – the JOUISSANCE collection now comes in the intimate form of roll-on perfume oil. In honour of perfumes that can be carried and applied wherever you happen to find yourself, this week’s Diary is a literary guide to the art and glamour of getting ready anywhere.

The association between daring self-expression and public preening became more visible during the roaring twenties. Imagine a woman using a compact, the archetypal image is probably a flapper: bobbed or shingled hair and stockings rolled down to her knees. The trend coincided with the early 20th century’s proliferation of portable make-up compacts – but whereas other women might discreetly check their reflections in a quiet corner, the flapper broke with convention, applying her (deliberately artificial) make-up in full view of the room.

“Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised herself with profound inertia from the floor where she had been occupied in alternately destroyed parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her expression with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked over the painting water, said, "Oh, damn!"—but let it lay—and left the room.”

At others, it was a statement of sexual freedom. In a scene from FW Murnau’s silent film Sunrise (1927), the evil, flapper-coded ‘Woman from the City’ uses a compact seconds before meeting a married man – a performance designed to seduce him away from his less sophisticated, natural-faced wife.

Sunrise (1927)

There’s no make-up scene more provocative than the one in Anais Nin’s ‘The Hungarian Adventurer’, easily one of the most shocking and subversive short stories in Delta of Venus. In it, the perverted protagonist ‘The Baron’ visits a famously beautiful dancer in her dressing room, where he finds her “rouging her sex with her lipstick” in front of a group of admirers.

It’s a description that delights in its audacity as well as its eroticism: a woman using make-up to assert control over a roomful of men. As Nin notes, while they watch they are not permitted “to make a single gesture towards her”, making clear the power she wields in her own carefully staged performance.

A similar power struggle can be seen in Mike Nicols’ 1988 film Working Girl, though here between two women. Katharine Parker, a ruthless executive on wall street played by Sigourney Weaver, prepares for a meeting with her lover in front of her assistant, Tess (Melanie Griffiths). Dressed in lingerie and daubing her neck from a bottle of Guerlain’s Shalimar, she casually displays the privileges that come with status and wealth, showing that erotic and professional power are closely intertwined – and reminding Tess of her place at the same time. Tess gets the better of Katharine in the end, but it’s still this image of feminine authority that lingers long after the credits have rolled.

Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl (1988)

“Never complain, never explain.” So goes the motto adopted from two-time prime minister Benjamin Disraeli by the Royal family. Perhaps that’s why Queen Elizabeth II chose to speak with her make-up. At public events, she would take her lipstick out of her bag and apply it, which reportedly signalled to her ladies-in-waiting that she was ready to leave. She became so practiced that she could do it without the need for a mirror.

“She awoke, put on a fresh chemise, then a blue morning jacket, and was placed in front of her mirror. Never would she consider receiving her coterie without being made up at a preliminary toilette. This was a hasty session, in which her hair was brushed and enough cosmetics applied to make her presentable. When her guests arrived around one o'clock, she was still en déshabillé, while her maid dusted her hair with blue-white powder."

Queens have historians to interpret each and every public appearance, but for the rest of us, messages can sometimes be mistranslated. There’s a moment in François Sagan’s La Chamande where make-up is the source and symbol of a miscommunication between lovers:

In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, a similar blur exists between fragility and bravado. Each time the unnamed narrator observes Holly Golightly putting on her make-up, it serves as a shield against her precarious reality, allowing her to inhabit the glamorous, carefree persona of a New York party girl.

In Blake Edwards’ film adaptation, Holly’s dressing table (the postbox containing a mirror, lipstick and a bottle of perfume) lives in the liminal space between her apartment and the street, allowing her a final coat of armor against the world. A last-minute protective ritual witnessed only by those close to her.

When it comes to getting ready in front of someone else, the watcher can be just as important as the star. The link between cosmetics and seduction is never far away. In her song, ‘Off to the Races’, Lana Del Rey describes the show she puts on for her lover, getting ready in the shared space of the hotel room.

A reminder that the most effective beauty rituals can sometimes be those we perform for a chosen audience of one.