What is it about Tilda Swinton? Whether on screen, or dragging a mobile cinema across the wilds of Scotland, she always looks weirdly, starkly beautiful, her face as other-worldly as the face of the moon.

There's something similarly captivating about Grace Coddington, arguably the world's greatest stylist and the woman who comes out on top in The September Issue (the movie made behind the scenes at American Vogue). It's not her incomparable fashion talent, nor even her signature mane of red hair that transfixes. As with Tilda, it's that face. Naked.

Naked in a world where all else is artifice, in a world funded largely by the proceeds of beauty advertising, a world dedicated to contrivance, duplicity and guile. And there she is. Not a scrap of make-up, the antithesis of Anna Wintour's carefully coiffed and impeccably polished look.

Brilliant. At last, it seems, my own face is in fashion (there's even a no-make-up vibe up there on the catwalks, at Chloe, Stella McCartney and Burberry Prorsum).

I have always been with Tilda and Grace on this one — perplexed by the mass of metallic mascaras, denim-blue eyeshadows and coral-coloured cheek-stains available on the market. It's not that I think make-up is a pernicious mask forced upon women by a society which demands conformity to a misogynist beauty ideal, or any such blah. It's just that I can't be arsed with all that patting, blending and puckering (if you have ever watched a make-up artist apply concealer, you will fall off your chair in sheer agonising boredom, waiting for the moment she stops faffing around with her blunt-ended brush).

Really, I'd rather stuff a mushroom. As Gordon Brown must surely know, the whole palaver just takes such an age — time that could be better spent, ooh, I don't know, yodelling or learning to play the flute.

Besides, surely all the painting, stripping, painting and stripping — fun though it looks — can't be good for the skin. This is the position of Eve Lom, the world's most renowned facialist and a bona fide beauty guru, who says if we let our faces breathe more, we'd look and feel better for it.

Skin health is “all down to oxygen, water and food”, she argues (I'll drink to that) — and the first thing she does when someone comes to her with a problem is to reduce the number of products they put on their overloaded skin.

If I were to come clean, though, the bottom line is that make-up of almost any description makes me look like a transvestite. I might love those Bobbi Brown nude palettes, and Mac's Barely There Sculpting Powders, but put me in proper blusher and I'm Cages aux Folles. Add lipstick and I'm Danny La Rue. I remember coming home from a photoshoot a few years back in a full face of slap, and my youngest child burst into tears, hid behind the sofa and shrieked “What have you done with my Mummy?”

It's this dissimulation which fazes me: made-up, I look in the mirror and see someone else staring back. Someone not entirely comfortable in her own skin. Someone who should have her own show in Vegas. I'm also, if truth be told, rubbish at applying the stuff, despite many teenage years spent alone with only eyelash curlers and David Sylvian for company.

There are entire product categories which I have never fathomed, let alone mastered. Eyeshadow is a good example. What are you supposed to do with it? I've tried shading the socket and highlighting the brow-bone and blending out towards the hairline and all the other how-to instructions that girls learn at around the same time as they're getting a handle on French kissing and continental drift.

Whenever I do it, I look as though I have walked into a door. And perhaps, in the end, that explains my reluctance to join in with this age-old ritual of femininity. In make-up, I look worse, not better.

In my experience, make-up junkies find this hard to swallow. My friend Lou, who runs a cosmetics company, is forever coming at me with a loaded blusher brush, desperate to discover the cheekbones she knows must be lurking there somewhere. But still I resist, listing my make-up-free benefits while Lou rolls her glitter-lined eyes: I can wash with just water, I say.

I can dive into swimming pools and not surface with panda eyes. My handbag, I bet, weighs less than yours. My lips aren't so addicted to Blistex and Carmex that I reach for a pot every 12 seconds. I don't have forgotten tubes of curdy lip-gloss weeping all over dressing-table drawers and the inner pockets of expensive handbags.

Not doing make-up is great - a time-saving, money-saving, face-saving advantage in life. With the confidence of years, I've found that I don't need the buzz of cobalt eyeliner, the thrill of the novel lip colour of the season or the new tinted moisturiser with skin-popping, light-reflecting mineral spherical particles, or whatever tosh is coming up next.

Far better an unfettered face, a grown-up, wised-up, straight-up face. I'm guessing Grace Coddington and Tilda Swinton would agree.