It's not about "trying to hide it", it's trying to do it in such a way that the viewer doesn't get overly distracted by the processing and miss out on the photo. Pretty much why I hate HDR shots.
Selective desaturation for me has always been a big cliché, but there are times when it makes absolute sense to do this, the main theme which you've pretty much touched on is focus on a particular subject. However I feel like you've left some areas coloured which makes it hard for a viewer to know exactly where you want to focus, needs to be more concentrated (like a red balloon in a crowd, a girl in a red dress in a crowd, a wild rose in a field, blood on some battlefield, some tumbling phonebooths I took 7 years ago) The iconic shots always focus on red being the primary attention drawing colour, if you're going to spare others then you're only going halfway with the selective desaturation. The red lips has always been the centre of focus for geishas so that's why i suggested to only focus on that (i'm assuming that was the point of the mono makeup).
Play with the curves! None of this is definitive "you need to do x to make it a good photo" because all of this is subjective however you should mess around with it just to see if it really is better as it is.
if I get another justification reply then this conversation is OVER!