Bum. It’s taken 58 years and multiple tutorials with my mate Mia to get to grips with how to do eyeliner. But just when I’ve reached the point that I’m not totally cack-handed at it, turns out that wearing make-up means I’m a coward. Or something like that. I’m possibly betraying the sisterhood and I’m certainly not chic.

Thanks for nothing, Pamela Anderson.

Yes, Pam, it has not gone unnoticed by me or my new glowy BB cream that every time you show up somewhere sans make-up you’re hailed as braver than Braveheart. This week alone, your barefaced turn at the Gotham Awards drew raves including “living on her own terms”, “ethereal vision”, and “defying Hollywood’s beauty standards”.

Aaaagh. Right now, courtesy of the responses to Pam saying wearing her old slap now “didn’t really make sense”, being make-up-free seems the pinnacle of feminism. But is it really? Or is this just another impossible standard being dangled in front of women, wrapped up in the guise of freedom?

It’s all making me abhor the great Pam a bit. I mean, she’s a natural beauty. She has a perfect canvas. And likely also access to a dermatologist’s office where making jowls, lunar landing forehead and natural skin look unnaturally good is a science.

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Let’s not pretend she chucked her make-up bag in the bin one day and said, “Here’s the new Jan Brady.” There’s more at play here. Pamela is the face of her own skincare brand, Sonsie. Were I a cynic, I’d suspect Meghan Markle wrote the tagline “Be Sonsie, Be You!” and that Pam is saying don’t buy make-up, just my magical skincare stuff.

Then this becomes not about smashing the beauty industry’s unrealistic standards but about profiting off them in a different way. It becomes about Pamela having a financial stake in this bare-faced trend, with her skincare brand front and centre of the narrative and us all meanwhile transfixed by her “courage” as she sells us serum and maybe a lie.

And this is where the problem gets bigger for me. This isn’t just about Pamela saying she likes how her nude face looks. She’s being held up as the poster child for a new kind of beauty standard. One that’s just as unattainable for the average woman, she of the tired dark-circled eyes, menopause rosacea and simultaneous pimples and wrinkles.