 "and so it begins," I muttered bitterly to myself as I read the article. I could so easily have missed it, nestling amid news of vegetables that cause or preclude cancer or both, and personality traits that attract or repel the opposite sex or both. Its claim seemed modest: "Four in 10 women over 50 told a survey that some of their most trusted beauty essentials cost less than ? 5." It went on to list some of the cheaper products that women apparently prefer to top-of-the-range beautifying agents.  You could be forgiven for thinking that this is the very definition of non-news - a minor coup for the marketing department of a petroleum jelly conglomerate. But in a world where Richard Hammond, that pocket battleship of masculinity, can be accused of having age-defying injections, it means so much more. It is the harbinger of a profound societal shift.  The terrifying conspiracy that grips us is finally becoming clear. It's a conspiracy to reverse a great unfairness - to free half of humanity from an unjust yoke by transferring it to the other half. This is nothing as trivial as global warming or the rise of the Bric economies. The appalling burden of sartorial and cosmetic effort is being shifted from women on to men.  The slow rise of male grooming products, the march of the gels and balms, the replacement of the shirt and the haircut with the "shirt" and the "haircut", were the first signs - rejected by many as suggesting only that men's grooming conventions were coming into line with women's, which would be regrettable enough in itself. But now, with the first sign that women are starting to reject cosmetics, the sheer scale of the forthcoming makeover is becoming clear.  I imagine myself, in extreme old age, my face surgically taut, painted and powdered, my feeble limbs lacquered with fake tan, bunioned feet shoved into vertiginous shoes, wigged, dyed and pierced all over, reminiscing about the time, decades earlier, when I last saw a woman apply lipstick. The Two Ronnies' cross-dressing sketch, "The Worm that Turned", will finally be recognised as the work of prophetic genius that it was.  It can't be long before all my moaning about the prevalence of moisturiser, about TV adverts depicting men in bathrooms unselfconsciously and approvingly caressing their own faces, will be vindicated. "Stop sneering at designer clothes!" male friends told me. "Wearing an ironed shirt is not an act of surrender!" they insisted. "The fact that your hair is cut in such a wilfully displeasing way is just your choice, not an example of gender heroism!" they claimed.  Well, we'll see. We'll see where all the styling and back-waxing gets them. What starts as personal choice born out of self-esteem - a bit of self-pampering because you're worth it - can grow into a terrifying network of conventions which is bigger than any of us. Luxuries can morph into necessities; choices, however initially eccentric, can become rules. Bound feet are a high price to pay for a thriving retail sector.  But I'm a traitor to my cause. For so long I was strong. I washed my face with soap and water. I never wore aftershave, aspiring instead to smell of nothing at all. I rejoiced in the long white hairs that occasionally grew out of my ears. Then one day I found myself buying some "leave-in" conditioner. From that moment, they had me.  Of course, the first fix was free. The make-up lady on a TV show gave me this stuff that you squirted on your hair after you washed it so that it was less frizzy when it dried. That seemed reasonable at the time. Only much later did I realise I'd been duped into aspiring to have "more manageable hair".  So I took to using it. I don't know if it did much good but, thereafter, to stop applying it would seem like deliberately choosing to have worse hair. It's one thing to resist making beautifying changes but quite another to make actively uglifying ones. Spraying the stuff on had become the status quo. To stop doing so would be like saying that my hair looked too good, that its manageability was oppressing others, that they might be dazzled by its gloss.  That would be so vain! Suddenly, continuing to condition my hair - and that phrase genuinely makes me shudder - felt like the only modest course 