It costs a lot to look this political. Emmanuel Macron’s personal make-up artist recently filed two claims for payment: one for €10,000 (£9,200) and one for €16,000 (£14,740) – both for doing his make-up for press conferences. The claims cover his first three months in office, meaning he’s been spending almost €10,000 per month on make-up since becoming president. Which shouldn’t be too surprising, when you realise there is a whole industry, literally, a whole self-help industry consisting of earnest books and stripy jumpers and diets, selling us tricks to appear more French.

The real problem with vanity is being caught in the act

But the international outrage expressed is at Macron’s vanity. Male vanity, this perfumed albatross that men must hide beneath their blazers like a goitre for fear of seeming vulnerable, but with a gravitational pull so strong it leads them to organise speeches at sweet little places like the Palace of Versailles. The real problem with vanity is being caught in the act. This “expenses reveal” is the media equivalent of somebody catching your mirror face, the pony-like pout your lips stiffen into when they happen upon a reflective surface, be it a car window or the back of a dessert spoon. Worse than being caught masturbating, worse than a stranger walking in on you in the Tesco’s loo, somebody seeing your private mirror face, and therefore not just the real you, the vain you, but the you that you most desperately want to present to the world, is the most excruciating of embarrassments.

The associations we have with make-up and that me-time in the mirror are largely shameful, and grimly gendered. There was some kerfuffle last week after comments Zadie Smith made at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, about limiting her seven-year-old daughter’s mirror time, were mis-framed as a way of scoffing at women’s vanity. Out of context, Smith’s quote, her insistence that an hour and a half for contouring was too long, was pinned to the women’s wall on the internet and pelted with darts by people who felt she was judging their choice to wear make-up. It’s something about the way news works today that leads to these high-pitched rows between otherwise sane and clever women, as if the reporter had chucked a stink bomb over the fence before running away. Is it because we’re trained to rise to it, like mice in a lab? Or because, while we’re primed to resist, it’s easier to slap out against the people we saw as allies – they’re closer, after all?

Anyway, Zadie Smith wasn’t dismissing those of us who enjoy make-up, she was pointing out the disparity between the grooming that is expected of men and women, and teaching her daughter the reality of what those before her have labelled the “hair and make-up tax”. “I explained it to her in these terms: you are wasting time,” she said. “Your brother is not going to waste any time doing this. Every day of his life he will put a shirt on, he’s out the door and he doesn’t give a shit if you waste an hour and a half doing your make-up.” The cheap alternative, of course, is that men like Macron encourage everybody to take the time to enjoy the thrill of a flattering mirror, and the magic that comes with a really good mattifier.

It’s not that men like Macron or children like Smith’s daughter shouldn’t care about how they look, though the arguments that have bubbled up around them have sought to debate that point. The service these arguments have provided instead is that they’ve opened a window into the twitchiness so many have about vanity, and what is correct.

There are seas and oceans between enjoying the sport of painting your face, and the dangerous pursuit of perfection or even “normality”, and I write this having dabbled in both, my face having caused me such anxiety in the past that I’ve cancelled plans, not wanting to be seen. And now having grown older and busier, and formed whole personalities around eyeliner, time spent in front of the mirror with a make-up bag, while sometimes frustrating, is largely jolly and joyful, and pockmarked with nostalgia.

It’s not nothing, the time spent looking at ourselves. It has value. Whether that’s €10,000 a month I can’t say, but I do know vanity is not simple, and making-up is not wasted time. The danger is in the risk of falling into the mirror as if a deep lake, and drowning for a little while.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman