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.

Still, there’s something entrancing about a woman performing beauty rituals in public – an intimate glimpse into the process, not just the finished product. It sparks a frisson of oversharing that recalls a lost form of exhibitionism, before social media, before the boundaries between public and private life dissolved. In this small act lies a subtle message, a declaration of presence. To anoint oneself in public is to acknowledge one's awareness of being seen – and to choose what to reveal.

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.

The flapper’s penchant for public painting spoke volumes. At times, it bolstered the subculture’s characteristic air of cultivated ennui, witnessed by the reader in all its languid and leisurely detail in ‘The Ice Palace’, a short story from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1920 collection, Flappers and Philosophers:

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.