Look at the rituals before leaving home. Hair checked, shirt adjusted, face inspected, spectacles repositioned, beard negotiated with. Nobody calls this vanity.

Humans have done versions of this for thousands of years. Ancient civilisations used cosmetics, perfumes and adornment, with appearance carrying messages about wealth, status and belonging. The first person who decorated himself was probably hoping somebody would notice.

We have understood this instinct while maintaining a respectable distance from the word vanity. Jewellery is tradition. Clothes are culture. Grooming is hygiene. Wedding preparation is ritual.

Yet underneath these explanations sits the old human desire to make an impression. We tell children that beauty is superficial while asking whether a prospective bride or groom is good-looking. We say age is merely a number while celebrating someone for looking ten years younger. We say character matters more than appearance and then notice the appearance first. We have never eliminated vanity. We have simply taught it to behave in public.

That behaviour is changing. A man colouring his grey hair does not necessarily say he does not want to look old. He is maintaining himself. Someone treating wrinkles is looking after skin health. Someone having a cosmetic procedure is investing in confidence. A person spending heavily on grooming is practising self-care. The explanations can be sincere. They also show how thoroughly vanity has been rehabilitated. Vanity has acquired a communications department.

Consider spectacles. For generations, glasses were something people wanted to hide. Then fashion arrived and spectacles became an accessory. A particular frame could make someone look intellectual, artistic, serious or affluent. We first tried to hide what corrected our eyesight and then discovered that it could improve our appearance. A medical necessity became a fashion statement.

Hair is even more revealing. We colour grey hair, restore receding hairlines, treat thinning hair, conceal bald patches, condition beards, shape eyebrows and remove hair from places where we have suddenly decided it should not exist. There are treatments to grow hair and treatments to remove it, sometimes purchased by the same person.

But vanity has another, more entertaining side. Some people want the body to look more polished, controlled and hairless. Others take pride in displaying precisely what nature supplied, whether it is body hair, grey hair, wrinkles or a deliberately unmanicured appearance. One person sees an unshaved armpit as liberation. Another sees it as a reason to look away. One person thinks grey hair is dignified. The same body can therefore be considered attractive, unattractive, natural, careless, liberated or desirable depending on who is looking.

We keep inventing standards of beauty and then behave as though nature itself had issued them. There is nothing in nature that says an armpit should be hairless, a face should be wrinkle-free, a head should have black hair at fifty or a man’s jaw should have a particular shape. These are decisions made by cultures, markets, fashions and sometimes sheer collective madness. Then enough of us agree on the same preference and suddenly it becomes “normal”. We forget that normal is often just a fashion that has stayed long enough to acquire societal acceptance.

This is where vanity becomes less about beauty and more about identity. We do not merely want to look good. We want our appearance to say something about us. I care about grooming. I don’t care about grooming. I am youthful. I am mature. I am traditional. I am modern. I reject conventional beauty. I have mastered conventional beauty. All of these can become performances, and all of them can attract an audience.

The beard has received its own promotion. A man once grew one because he had stopped shaving. Today there are oils, balms, washes, shaping and styling. Our fathers had a razor. Their sons have a grooming strategy.

This is also a generational shift. Younger men have crossed that border without apology. Skincare, sunscreen, serums, facials and hair treatments are increasingly ordinary parts of male life. The older generation sees insecurity. The younger sees agency. Both look at the same mirror.

Cosmetic medicine has made the negotiation precise. Botox, fillers, lasers, peels, skin tightening, hair restoration, teeth whitening and jawline enhancement allow people to intervene where earlier generations simply had to accept biology. People should have choices about their bodies. But the commercial machine keeps discovering new imperfections for us to notice. Or rather worry about, and spend in removing that worry.

Advertising has become much cleverer because it understands that vanity has many tribes. It can sell the fantasy of perfect skin to one person and the fantasy of effortless natural beauty to another. It can sell hair removal and then celebrate body hair. It can sell anti-ageing while running campaigns that romanticise ageing. It can persuade one consumer to conceal nature and another to display it proudly.

The advertising industry has understood something we rarely admit: even our rebellion can be packaged and sold back to us.

Today the language is gentler: glow, radiance, rejuvenation, wellness, confidence, self-expression, your best self. The message has changed from “something is wrong with you” to “nothing is wrong with you, but you could be better”. That is a much more profitable proposition because better has no endpoint.

Then came the smartphone. The old mirror showed us ourselves. The phone shows us thousands of other faces, many filtered, edited, posed and carefully lit. We now encounter versions of ourselves without pores or inconvenient evidence of age. AI can go further, altering faces to fit increasingly precise ideas of attractiveness.

In our cultural milieu and social hierarchy, Complexion, hair, dress, jewellery and bodily presentation have carried messages about class, caste, marriageability, prosperity and respectability. What looks like individual choice can still carry old social expectations.

The wedding captures the absurdity beautifully. The bride has long had a beauty ritual. The groom has now been admitted to the department. Facials, de-tans, hair treatments, beard shaping and teeth whitening can all enter the preparation for a ceremony at which two people who have already agreed to marry each other are preparing to be photographed. Love may be blind. The wedding photographer certainly isn’t.

And this is where the hypocrisy becomes difficult to ignore. We say, “Don’t judge people by looks,” while judging them before they have finished saying hello. We say character matters more than appearance while noticing the face, clothes, car and surname. We disapprove of vanity in principle and reward it in practice. We tell children not to care what people think while teaching them, often silently, exactly which opinions matter.

Perhaps vanity deserves less moral outrage. Wanting to look attractive, youthful, presentable or distinctive is human. So perhaps we should stop dressing vanity up in respectable language. Sometimes it is self-care. Sometimes it is confidence. Sometimes it is identity. And sometimes, despite all the sophisticated language, it is simply vanity.

There is no great crime in admitting it. Vanity is ancient. We have merely given it better products, better technology, more tribes and much better excuses.