I think the prevalence of nearly every Western woman wearing makeup is driven largely by marketing and social peer pressure from gender roles. In social circles where all the members are "
basic" estrogen junkies and trend followers, there will be high conformity with trends and social pressures. But in social circles where pressure to conform isn't as strong (e.g. nerds, women who work on farms or other manual-labor jobs, certain types of feminists, even women from Western nations where the culture simply isn't as makeup-obsessed as the US, etc.), far fewer women will bother to wear makeup.
I recall reading some writing from ancient Greece lamenting how women would wear makeup to darken their eyebrows, etc, so this type of vanity has always existed.
And men in some non-Western cultures do commonly wear makeup. Although in this particular example it might largely be ceremonial, rather than for daily vanity purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohl_(cosmetics)#Kohl_and_IslamBut, regarding cosmetics, I doubt any time period has been as aesthetically-inferior as Western civilization has been in the past ~120 years since people like Edward Bernays treated advertising as a literal form of propaganda and psychological warfare. Non-Western cultures may have "beauty standards" (which can be good or bad), but I think it is only Western civilization which convinces literally everyone their innate look is ugly and that they
need to change themselves with cosmetics.
According to the Western cosmetic industry:
People with straight hair need to curl it and use chemicals to "volumize" it. People with curly hair need chemically straighten it. People with light skin need to go tanning or use chemical treatments to darken their skin. People with dark skin need to use chemical treatments to lighten their skin (this is especially prevalent in non-Western nations which have been colonized!!) Etc, etc. The Western cosmetic industry doesn't even have any real beauty standards--it just exists to make people insecure to drive economic demand for new products.