What do you think the sort of man responsible for lyrics such as, ‘So we gonna smoke a ounce to this, G's up hoes down while you mother****ers bounce to this’ does to whiles away his spare time? Counting his guns? Messing around with gigantic cars? Hanging out on the fringes of petty (and not so petty) crime? Well, if ever a stereotype was shattered to its core, it’s right now: the man behind this lyric is the rapper Snoop Dogg and he quite enjoys spending his time indulging in the comparatively benign pleasures of nail art.

Indeed, a few weeks ago, Snoop posted an image to Instagram of himself, sat proudly in his home, fingers splayed to reveal the efforts of a travelling troupe of manicurists; his nail tips bore the colours of the Jamaican flag. Yes. Snoop has nail technicians COME AND VISIT HIM AT HOME. I don’t know a single woman who takes her nails that seriously. He captioned the image, ‘Hands of Time’, nicely hurdling any mention of the nail art itself at all. Still, he got trolled for it in the comments, pointing to the fact that – particularly in the machismo world of hip-hop, traditional gender roles are not only played to, but clung to.

Still, hip-hop’s parlay into the world of out-and-proud beautification from the point of view of the male is a progressive wave that can’t be broken. Mere days before Snoop’s photo, P Diddy - during his pre-Golden Globes aesthetic prep - posted a photograph of himself to his Instagram account with a pair of de-puffing under-eye patches. ‘For the next hour I'm giving a tutorial on how to get ready for the Golden Globes. These here are cucumber patches flown in from Milan. I know it looks crazy, but nobody said perfection was easy.#diddyglobes’, he said. It garnered 37 thousand likes and reached almost every corner of the media world. We all started theorising on the provinence of Puffy’s patches; were they SK-II? Shiseido? 

Either way, it doesn’t matter. Because somehow, Puff Daddy (yes, you can rest easy, he’s officially back to being called Puff Daddy) managed to make it look tough, and in doing so, gave a new significance to the notion of taking pride in your male appearance. And that’s the thing, the visual dichotomy of a classic beauty ritual combined with the steely, nonchalantly proud facial expression that’s become a hip-hop, rap and R’n’B motif, well, it kind of really works. Looking at it makes me happy. If nothing else, who says these accoutrements are the preserve of women only?

"I know it looks crazy, but nobody said perfection was easy" - Puff Daddy

A little background; Puffy has always openly attested to the power of beauty, in its business potential at least, having conceived his own skincare and fragrance line, named, of course - Sean John almost a decade ago. With fragrance as unmistakably macho as ‘Unforgivable’ and ‘I am King’, there’s no worry about Puff Daddy putting himself down all the time. It’s conceited yes, but hip-hop has no problem with conceit, it’s what its walls are built on. 

In fact, fragrance and hip-hop have become a pertinently fruitful union in recent years; JAY-Z’s recently launched fragrance, Gold Jay Z, outsold David Beckham’s by 8-1 in its first two weeks on sale. But, the real crystallisation came from everyone’s favourite skateboarder, Pharrell (OK, not quite rap, but there’s shades of hip-hop and R’n’B) who was tapped by Comme Des Garcons, big players – with big fashion credentials – in the scent world, to collaborate on its forthcoming scent, Girls (which is, handily, also the name of Pharell’s latest number 1 album). In an interview with Vogue Australia, Comme Des Garcon’s CEO, Adrian Joffe noted that Pharell ‘knew exactly what he wanted the perfume to smell like, right from the beginning.’ The key word here, being ‘perfume’, Pharrell is creating a feminine scent – a perfume for women. Only Justin Bieber does that, right? Not anymore. 

"There’s quite a powerful symbiosis at play here; hip-hop, despite its glamorising of guns, gang culture and violence, is a conduit of pride and self-assuredness"

There’s quite a powerful symbiosis at play here; hip-hop, despite its glamorising of guns, gang culture and violence, is a conduit of pride and self-assuredness, a parlance intended to express the successes - romantic or otherwise - of each of its story-tellers. Similarly, the message that underpins each and every beauty product is one of self-celebration, a toolkit to boost and enhance the way we look and feel, and by extension, a way of telling the world that 'yeah, we're not bad, actually.'

Of course, the love affair between beauty hip-hop started with women. Etched on my brain forever is the image of Lil’ Kim, dressed up like the love child of a mermaid and a Quality Street on the red carpet of the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, with an intentionally artificial-looking violet wig. Wigs are OK in hih-hop land, more than OK, they are enjoyed, while (aside from their use for hair loss) the rest of the world looks upon them merely as questionable hen-night ephemera. Missy Elliot, Beyonce, Eve, Nicki Minaj and TLC; they romped through the beauty world with more vigour than a teenager at a pageant, it was electrifying. When Missy Elliot quipped, ‘If ya a fly girl, get your nails done, get a pedicure, get your hair did’, we all wanted to get our hair did – immediately. 

Social media has solicited an entirely new model for the traditional trope of the ‘beauty icon’, someone of whom we look to for aesthetic inspiration, an archetype of femininity and glamour. Time was, it’d be the pages of celebrity magazines (the trashier ones, under the cloak of darkness) that we’d find our beauty heroes; a new set of honey highlights on Gwyneth, a reality star with impossibly shiny hair…. No more. In 2014, our thirst for information - and images - has precipitated a shift: beauty icons are found in our Instagram or Twitter feeds, which is why Snoop Dogg and Puff Daddy are just as good as any.