There is little to love about having a cold, damp vulva. Or so I discovered when I applied an “activated charcoal sheet mask” to mine. The product in question, Blackout, is by a “luxury vulva care” brand called Two L(i)ps. The company’s promotional material says it is “ready to disrupt and redefine the vulva space”. Before disrupting my own, however, I had to navigate the packaging. After slipping it from its peach-coloured pouch, you have to pull away a sheet of white “lace” to reveal its dark, sopping glory. “Dim the lights and relax as your skin is detoxified and clarified,” say the instructions on the box, which tell you to leave the mask on for 15-20 minutes, then pat the “remaining serum” on to the skin. Lying on the sofa, mortified by my own company, I last no more than six. Of all the mistakes I’ve made in my intimate life, looking down to see that sprawling blackness, its “lace” film lying sadly by my thigh, is definitely up there, so to speak.

I may be a cynic, but there is a hungry market for these products: Two L(i)ps boasts that 10,000 units of Blackout (£15.50 for a single mask, £66 for a set of five) were sold in the two and a half months after its launch. The brand has developed a range of “luxury vulva care” products including Pout, a “hydrating serum” made of 95% pure hyaluronic acid (£99 for 30ml), and Undercover (£99 for 30ml), an “anti-blemish cream” to “stay spotless”. The cream is made from the skin-whitening agent palmitoyl hexapeptide-36, and comes with the instruction to apply SPF30 sunscreen to the area the following day, no doubt with all that offering-our-naked-labia-to-the-sky sorcery us women get up to in mind.

Ahead of the launch of this range, Two L(i)ps created a hashtag: #loveyourvulvamore. (In the name of empowerment, you understand.) But, while some women may make the informed choice to buy such products, choosing to treat their vulva like an extension of their face – a scrutable surface to be constantly preened and perfected – others will argue that the real power lies with the brand itself. More specifically, in the exchange of money.

The most secret part of a woman’s body is so often shrouded in conditioned shame and awkwardness from when we are very young. There is a tyranny of “shoulds” for how we ought to look, smell, use and enjoy what is ours. “The stigma around female genitalia is so ingrained,” says the consultant gynaecologist and psychosexual counsellor Dr Leila Frodsham. “I have been a gynaecologist for 25 years, and women have always apologised. So often, I hear the phrase: ‘What an awful job you have.’ It is quite heartbreaking.”

When this sense of shame is capitalised on by figures such as Gwyneth Paltrow and positioned as something that can be assuaged by treating our vaginas and vulvas with products her “wellness and lifestyle company”, Goop, has lovingly curated for us (because it, too, knows what it is like), it can be incredibly seductive; a shared mission, almost. Paltrow even created a candle that supposedly smells of her vagina. The singer-songwriter Erykah Badu is releasing a new incense – Badu’s Pussy – based on the smell of hers. “The people deserve it,” she said.

Maybe we do deserve our homes to smell of celebrity vaginas, but the wider rise in “luxury” vulva care builds a new level in the game of female anxieties being sold as quick-fix products. If we are insecure about the colour of our vulva or its (gulp) lack of “pout”, a £99 bottle of serum is not as drastic or as expensive as laser treatment, but it is doing something about it, under the guise of self-care.

Another company, The Perfect V, sells cleansers, lotions, “beauty sheets”, mists, serums and a “luminiser”, lest your vulva not shimmer like an aurora. The brand is “inspired by Scandinavian women [who] feel comfortable, carefree and confident in their skin, strip in public whatever their age or shape and are at ease with themselves – a very alluring trait”. But it, too, cannot deal with biological language, only referring to “the V”. The website shouts about “the vanicure” and a “beauty regimen for the V” but only mentions the word vulva once on its homepage. A growing market for products that promise to make our vulvas more beautiful, with brands that cannot explicitly acknowledge the vulva itself? Fabulous.

Frodsham aligns any growing popularity with the wider awareness and demand for cosmetic and surgical procedures – itself a product of the early and prevalent use of pornography, where perfectly pink, hairless vulvas are the norm. Boys seeing vulvas like this in porn grow into young men who expect it to be that way. “Twenty-five years ago, every woman I saw had pubic hair,” she says. “Now I so rarely see it.” It is particularly telling that almost every vulva beauty product is predicated on smooth skin or treating areas where hair has been removed. You cannot “luminise” skin that is covered in hair.

About 15 years ago, Frodsham had an “influx of women” requesting labiaplasty, the short surgical procedure that reduces the size or changes the shape of the labia minora and majora. “We had a 400% increase in requests, and it is still a prevalent conversation. This is not just women requesting ‘tightening’ post-childbirth, either; it is teenagers coming to see me with terrible feelings about their genitalia,” she says.

In light of this, 10 years ago, the NHS classified female genital cosmetic surgery (FGCS) as a low-priority procedure that should not be undertaken unless medically necessary. It is stressed that FGCS cannot ethically be offered to under-18s because of anatomical development during puberty. “I had one awful case where a young girl wanted labiaplasty because girls at her school were being encouraged to take pictures of their vulvas to be scored by other pupils,” says Frodsham. The growing popularity (440,000 followers and counting) of Instagram accounts such as the Vulva Gallery, and its gently explicit exploration of vulva diversity, offers a glimmer of hope that awareness may be shifting.

Where the NHS rejects, the private sector – bound by less rigorous regulation and need for clinical evidence base – moves in. “More private clinics began offering genital cosmetic surgery straight away,” says Frodsham. “Something like labiaplasty can take as little as 15 minutes, but costs up to £5,000, so there is naturally going to be a market for quick-fix ‘tightening’ creams for women who can’t afford the cost, but still feel there’s something wrong.”

Slap on a “gynaecologically tested” strapline (as Two L(i)ps does) and you feel as if you are investing in something credible and capable. But what do these terms mean? In the UK, General Medical Council registration guidelines prohibit doctors from endorsing commercial products. So it is unclear what these tests mean.

As with so much of the language in the wellness and beauty industries, the language treads a fine line between being scientific-sounding and vague enough to avoid legal action. Every stage of a woman’s reproductive life comes with a tangle of anxieties to navigate, almost always fuelled by new products claiming to fix them. “The narratives within our modern-day media and society regarding how women should and should not look, behave and feel can be very powerful,” says the clinical psychologist Kelly Abraham-Smith, who specialises in women’s health issues. “Distress can come when there is a mismatch between these narratives and a woman’s reality.”

CBD is a chemical that occurs in cannabis plants, and is now contained in a range of products, including oils, confectionery and drinks. The British brand The Tonic Tribe, which markets CBD products, has just released a product called Clit Spritz (£29.99 for 30ml), a “100% natural oil” that, according to its press release, “stimulates, lubricates and rejuvenates your lady parts using the cannabis plant … designed for women to give their bits a bit of a treat!” An estimated 1.3 million UK consumers now spend £300m a year on CBD products; an intriguing phenomenon given how little robust evidence there is to support the wide-ranging health claims users make. CBD lube is already a bestseller, but it was only a matter of time before entrepreneurs saw an opening – so to speak – in “vulva care”.

One of the most striking lines in Clit Spritz’s press release is how the “potent terpenes [the compounds in plants that give them their aroma] radiate the most wonderful scents, with natural tones of fresh mint and zesty citrus. You’ll feel fresh and fruity in all manner of ways!” Because this is the wider message, isn’t it? That a vulva cannot, and should not, just smell of a vulva; warm because it belongs to a human being, only needing to be washed in plain water.

You would hope that the appeal of another person encountering the most intimate part of a woman’s body, in a sexual context at least, lies in its animal nature and uniqueness; the fact that it is unlike anywhere else, hidden until she chooses to reveal it. The tacit suggestion that we are not loving ourselves enough unless we spend the money to try to give our vulvas the tone and luminosity of a cheekbone or a shoulder is, surely, a phenomenon worthy of great concern.