Pigeons & Peacocks

If the female face is a battleground – and, really, we all know it is – no feature feels the wrath of our cosmetic arsenal quite like the mouth. Whether matte, glossy, neon or vanilla-scented, the urge to put something – anything – on our lips is hard to resist. My own love affair with the sticky stuff began on a trip to the zoo, when a strawberry popsicle stain resulted in a highly successful air kiss being blown to a gorilla. 18 years on and I’m proud mistress of a converted spice rack / lipstick stand, which contains every colour you could ever want to see on someone’s mouth and some that you would not.

The average woman consumes between four and nine pounds of lipstick in her lifetime. In my case, we’re definitely talking double figures. Such rabid consumption can’t help but provoke the odd moment of introspection, particularly when your boyfriend’s shouting at you, “What’s that sticky stuff on your face? You look like you’ve crashed a Porsche!” The popularity of lipstick though, is inextricably linked to the supreme importance of the mouth. It is the one facial organ without which we are unable to survive and the first to develop after fertilisation – an excellent fact to have up your sleeve when justifying another apparently unnecessary purchase. The plasticity of our lips gives them enormous expressive potential, allowing us to sigh, sneer, growl and, on occasion, simper. This physical communicative ability is enhanced by the application of a cosmetic, which in itself constitutes a means of communication. That lipstick is inherently loaded with meaning is evident in its often controversial history. Since its first documented usage in an Ancient Egyptian illustration, it has alternated between periods of social acceptability, imperativeness and stigmatisation. In 1781 French women used roughly two million pots of rouge a year on cheek and lip, yet it was the last cosmetic item to be rehabilitated in the early twentieth century loosening of the tight stays of Victoria’s England.

For today’s emancipated woman, the symbolism in which lipstick is steeped is something to consciously exploit. As Diane Von Fustenberg would have it, “Lipstick is to the face what punctuation is to a sentence. It sets the tone and offers insight into the author’s intent.” Reading that quotation a few months ago for the first time, I suffered an uneasy half epiphany, which rapidly escalated into a full blown ‘cosmexistential’ crisis. Soon questions of authorial intent and whether or not I had any were putting me off everything except condensed milk and tofu. The crux of the matter was this: if my lipstick was to say what I wanted it to, I must first understand how others interpreted it. No wonder my ‘come hither’ look had been occasionally interpreted as ‘I’m the kind of girl who likes to make rice pudding’. Immediately limiting the damage, then, with a self-imposed lipstick ban, I set out to discover the most popular preconceptions surrounding two colours. Through conducting interviews with six female twenty-somethings and a little bit of book research I was able to create an exhaustive analysis of our relationship with the shades Red and Pink. For the enthusiasts, it will tell you a little bit about why we think things are the way they are. For the others, well, at least it means you can never again plead accidental trollop.

The pink analysed here is a soft one that, after being shopped around the twenty-somethings on various shirt collars, tea cups and handkerchiefs, was unanimously identified as ‘natural’. It is essentially a polished and consolidated version of the naked lip; idealised but without too much exaggeration. In this sense, it belongs to the Victorian school of lip presentation, which focused on a healthy and unadulterated appearance. Natural beauty, without negative connotations of vanity or artifice, was equated with a holistic inner goodness. (A lovely idea in theory, although perhaps a little hard on the naturally ill-favoured and, therefore, evil). This moralistic approach to facial adornment was magnificently espoused by the imperious Madame Lola Montes in the The Arts of Beauty, 1858, who laments lipstick’s, “sure destruction of that delicate char associated with the idea of ‘nature’s dewey lip’.” (One imagines that if Madame Lola were still in the beauty business today, she’d be doing bridal styling for the Young Republicans). When asked to describe the type of woman who wears this lipstick to me, the interviewees marked her out as someone who doesn’t want to stand out from the crowd but aspires to look, and therefore feel, good. She also likes River Island, mid-range cocktail bars and eating noodles on a Sunday.

Given such historical antecedents, it is not surprising that interviewees were quick to identify the shade with a traditional ‘Doris Day-esque’ model of femininity. Its deliberate inoffensiveness suggests a shy and artless personality and an appearance cultivated to please rather than attract. The nervous, youthful connotations of this unassuming approach are powerfully consolidated by the girlish associations of the colour pink, which interviewees developed into an exaggerated relationship with things that are sweet. When asked what world this lipstick would be, one interviewee said that the air would be filled with fairground sounds and the beds made of marshmallows. In other responses, traditional romantic, feminine associations would abound; a floral dress, a teddy bear and, of course, a Take That collection. Perhaps not surprisingly, this quiet romantic is imagined to be a success with both men and women, who are able to perceive her quiet inner goodness; “She’s a candy floss kind of girl… She gets on well with other girls and boys think she’s as sweet as sugar.”

There is, however, an essential paradox inherent in any artificial product that is designed to look natural. An apparently ‘honest’ makeup, be it natural or highly expressive, can be deliberately misleading – just let me get a bottle of cleanser near Jane Fonda. The act of choosing and applying a lipstick can never be done entirely without guile and, resultantly, not one of the interviewees though that the unassuming wearer of this lipstick would genuinely want it to go unnoticed. Rather, she would intend, “to show that she has made an effort to make herself up without making any major kind of statement.” This is typical of a more conservative approach to cosmetics where polished presentation is a means of showing respect for others and oneself. Such an attitude was at its most extreme in the Early Christian period when making herself up was considered a wife’s moral obligation if she wished good health and long life for her husband. (The implications of a bad hair day don’t bear thinking about). More recently, the stylised femininity of the 1950s face was a mask of conformism donned by post-war women in an attempt to find stability during a time when traditional gender roles were increasingly questioned. The placid, painted features of the perfect housewife convey an inner contentment that, in the Victorian tradition, logically extends to goodness. There’s an unpleasant imperative in Max Factor’s 1958 claim that, “A woman who doesn’t wear lipstick feels undressed in public, unless she works on a farm,” which is typical of this era.

This natural looking pink is therefore perceived as enabling its wearer to move somehow more easily and better-protected through the world. Whilst for some interviewees this motive seemed a guiltless one, for others the deliberate offensiveness of this woman released a tidal wave of hypothetical bile. She is just too timid and perhaps a little dim: “she was accosted by a friendly Clinique saleswoman (Audrey wondered why she was dressed as a doctor).” Rather than an enigmatically donned mask, her lipstick is seen as betraying a lack of imagination: “If this lipstick was a world it would be a shopping mall: quite a nice one, not entirely a monstrosity. Somewhere you’d only visit to go to the cinema.” The conventional girlishness of the colour also seems, to the feminists among the interviewees, unempowered. Whilst none go so far as to accuse its wearer of consciously exploiting traditional feminine associations to get a guy, most see it as betraying a certain man-centricity. Georgina, who’s taken a real dislike to this lipstick wearer, places her emphatically on the ‘hopeless’ side of ‘romantic’: “she could think of nothing more lovely than to be taken to Paris by her long term boyfriend to be proposed to. Unfortunately, she’s so desperate for this to happen it probably never will.” A social psychologist once described lipstick as ‘hope in a bottle’ and there is a feeling among the more critical interviewees that this is precisely the type of woman who oversubscribes to the fantasy. (An element of escapism has long been evident in romantically inclined advertising of the ‘Lipstick of Your Dreams’ variety). As an interviewee who has resolutely tagged this lipstick wearer ‘Audrey’ puts it: “It is Audrey’s little piece of escape from the office, from the hour lunch-break, the low carbs, the bar near the office, the men in the bar near the office.” Given ‘Audrey’s’ resolutely mid-level job and life – her hopeless subscription to ‘miracle’ aids, such as Debenhams support pants and Prets’s ‘No Bread’ sandwiches – you rather struggle to blame her.

The woman behind the soft pink lipstick proved remarkably consistent, with opinion divided only on the heady subject of whether or not she was a loser. The pillar box red, on the other hand, which I splashed around afterwards, provoked far more eclectic character imaginings. For one interviewee, she was a trendy young stylist; for another, an embalmed crone, reminiscing about the evening she spilt a drink down herself and had her bottom pinched by Liberace. Red lipstick is the cosmetic equivalent of the Little Black Dress. It is loaded with popular culture references both contemporary and historical. Whereas pink is worn to create and bolster the youthful, feminine archetype of its wearer, red is an archetype in its own right. Its obvious artifice heightens the sense of its independence from the wearer. The women who put it on deliberately buy into a rich of world of association, which they may or may not be able to control. Its multitudinous connotations and often controversial nature mean that it can be worn by different people for different reasons. However, as this list by an interviewee proves – “young trendy girls, prostitutes, transvestites, blonde people, Spanish-looking people, pale people, actresses, celebrities” – there is a common element. (And it’s not just that they were all sitting in the front row at Vivienne Westwood). Red lipstick, regardless of who wears it, inevitably carries a lingering odour of exoticism and sexuality, theatricality and glamour. Trying to remove the connotation is like trying to clean a lace hanky stained with grease paints and semen.
The controversy of red, then, lies not in uncertainty of meaning but our opinions and interpretation of it.

Lipstick of any colour has long been considered the most sexual of the cosmetics. That we know we look good applying it is a given – who’s ever paused halfway through a conversation to pump up their bronzer? There is an eroticism inherent in the very act of touching object to lip, which accounts for the continued stigmatisation of public lipstick application long after the wearing of it became acceptable. With red lipstick, this innate naughtiness is at its most pronounced. The interviewees took it as granted that semiotically the shade’s a lurid puddle of stirred passions, dark desires, guilt-ridden toreadors and Anna Paquin screaming for more. In direct contrast to its virginal confrere white, red has long been symbolically associated with awakened sexuality, be it the cloak of borderline pubescent Little Red Riding Hood, the scarlet sheath sported by Jessica Rabbit, or the poet Andrew Marvell’s troublingly erotic description of a fawn that is, “Lillies without, roses within.” Given this, it is not surprising that red lips have long been considered The Ultimate in physical attractiveness. A thirteenth century French poet described the ideal mouth as ‘plump and redder than cochineal’ and, although cochineal doesn’t fit easily into a contemporary frame of reference, I think we can imagine it very red indeed. In more recent culture, sexual ingenue Snow White had ‘lips as red as blood’ and countless screen sirens have smeared their lips crimson. Many thinkers have, of course, subscribed the inherent eroticism of red lips to the visual relationship between scarlet-painted mouth and enflamed vulva. (Don’t pretend you’re shocked – you knew I’d have to mention it eventually). The surrealists, in particular, were quite taken with the resemblance, visually exploiting it in works such as Man Ray’s L’Heure de l’Observatoire (1932) and Salvador Dali’s Lip Sofa (1970). Desmond Morris, a zoologist, puts it rather tastefully in his book, Body Watching: “During erotic arousal, lips become swollen, much redder, and more protuberant. The change they undergo mimics closely the alterations that are taking place on the other labia of the female genitals… It also explains why women have for thousands of years painted their lips red to make themselves more visually exciting.” Frankly, I don’t think you can be any clearer than that.

For some of the interviewees, the prospect of uniting their two sets of lips in crimson harmony was too visceral a one. “I look like a total whore who is going to give someone a blow job any second when I wear red,” said Georgina, who rapidly clarified that this wasn’t a look she’d ever want to go for. Colour connotations and biological explanations aside, the trickle down effect often makes glamour seem cheap and sensuality tarty. The negative cultural associations surrounding the colour have their roots in a history of popular objection. In the wonderfully entitled 1653 work, The Loathsomeness of Long Haire, puritan writer Thomas Hall describes red as ‘the badge of a harlot’. Now the wonderful and complicated relationship between female sexuality and society can be mused over endlessly but this is about lipstick, so we’ll set it aside for Germaine Greer and dinner parties. However, it is worth exploring one particular aspect of it that frequently occurs in the marketing rhetoric surrounding the subject: power. A key aspect of the historical aversion to female sexuality is a fear of its ability to mislead, to madden, to weaken and to sway. (All, incidentally, good names for perfumes). If masculine power is defined primarily by strength, the female weapon to match it is beauty. The Bible is populated by astonishingly seductive women, from Eve to Salome and Judith to Delilah, whose feminine charms prove the undoing of great men. Roman mythology contains the horrific myth of the vagina dentata (‘toothed vagina’), brought vividly to life in Mitchell Litchenstein’s 2007 gore fest, Teeth. Nowhere else is a more explicit link drawn between the painted mouth and the monstrous emasculating power of the female organ. Historical criticism of lipstick explicitly addresses its ‘unnatural’ power, with Thomas Hall (who really likes short hair), cursing its uncanny ability, “to kindle a fire and flame of lust in the hearts of those who case eyes upon it.” A 1770 British Act of Parliament actually decreed that, “women found guilty of seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means could be tried for witchcraft”. Imagine that decree put into action today; the Walk of Fame would run puce-coloured with Botox. Tapping into the fact that masculine enslavement might not prove entirely unattractive to both genders, much twentieth century lipstick advertising has sold its product on the basis of its seductive power. A 1945 Revlon advert for its classic colour ‘Fatal Apple’, deliberately inverts Puritan criticism with the line, “the most tempting colour since Eve winked at Adam.” In the famous ‘Fire and Ice’ campaign, a picture is painted of a woman who is wild and gloriously elated by sexual independence and power, albeit in a distinctly 1950s fashion. The over-excited copy quizzes ecstatically, “Have you ever danced with your shoes off? Do you close your eyes when you’re kissed? Do you sometimes hope the man next to you will be a psychiatrist?” (italics, my own) and finally, my personal favourite, “Would you streak your hair platinum without consulting your husband?”

To return to the interviewees, though, in case they start to feel neglected and as though their opinions aren’t important, who consistently interpreted red lipstick as something worn to increase sexual power. It is for this very reason that the more confident wear it themselves. Now, you might think that in these sexually emancipated times all traditional objections to the colour would be swept away. However, the relationship that some of the interviewees have with it is complicated and occasionally contradictory. One terribly earnest girl condemned it as ‘a bit slutty’ before going on to say that, “red lipstick makes me feel more sexy and confident.” I would have pointed my pen accusingly at her and demanded an explanation but she’d already gone on to say, interestingly, that, “I think men react to red lipstick the same way whereas women consider it as a threat towards them.” This recurring theme that the lady in red lipstick prefers the company of an all-male pack is a curious one, providing a direct contrast to the universal attractiveness of the demure pink wearer. Quite simply, red lipstick is perceived as predatory and women don’t like predators.
Fortunately, we can all console ourselves with the belief that a sexually aggressive approach fails to attract men in a more lasting sense. The interviewees certainly did and all agreed that the woman in this lipstick would be, at best, just a bit of fun and, at worst, intimidating. In this sense, red lipstick highlights another paradox inherent in most lip coatings; what looks good doesn’t feel good. A lipstick designed to incite the desire to touch texturally repels it. Gloss, incidentally, is just plain disgusting.

Having confirmed as well as only a group of woman openly speculating can that red lipstick is not, in fact, the way to a man’s heart it would appear that the real motive behind it is a desire for power, with sexuality as the weapon of choice. The interviewees all imagined a woman of the ball-busting career type, who wouldn’t wince at the sound of weaker skulls splintering beneath her enormous stilettos. Her approach to men would be the same as her approach to business; target-oriented and focused on getting ahead: “She makes time for those with business connections, and those among her male friends who are still single.” In this context lipstick, quite literally, becomes war paint. Authorial intent is aggressively deployed and an innocuous stick of pigment, wax, oil and emollient is wielded like a luxury-branded mace. It is, of course, no surprise that in the twentieth century, the increased usage of lipstick and the arrival of women in the work place have directly correlated. In 1933, US Vogue recognised its morale boosting powers when it wrote, “if we were perpetuating the gesture of the twentieth century for posterity, an ode could be written to it, and the way in which it serves as a staff for our morale, as well as a beautifier of our faces.” Continually high sales in the face of war, depression and recession back this up. World War II American and British posters for women at work are characterised by perfectly made up faces operating heavy machinery. Incredibly, in an action of sheer brilliance, Allied forces gave lipsticks to the dying female inmates of liberated concentration camp, Bergen-Belson. A soldier who was present poignantly wrote: “I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick… At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.”

If all lipstick is a mask, red is a colour that revels in its own artifice. This obviousness is another important component of its emboldening power. Human beings have always used masks to gain an upper-hand over opponents, be it decoratively or through armour. To conceal features is to conceal purpose. Historically, cosmetics have often exploited this. The stark face of the eighteenth century court beauty granted her the untouchability of the objet d’arte. The dark features of the 1920s vamp gave her the courage to overturn the old system and survive in an upturned post-war world. Glamour, a term taken directly from the language of witchcraft, is a particularly powerful contemporary mask, carrying with it a potent assumed superiority. Red lipstick, therefore, by parading its own artifice has the power both to project a desired personality and conceal a real one. Interestingly though, nearly all the interviewees responded by asking, “What does she have to hide?” The bravado sparks the suspicion that behind it something is lacking: “it could be used as a mask, behind which the wearer secretly struggles with all kinds of issues and insecurities that they wouldn’t want anyone to know about.” Resultantly, the collective character imaginings saw practically every positive projection deliberately cultivated by the wearing of red lipstick dismantled and exposed. For one interviewee, the sexual predator is, in fact, rather nervous; “She likes to think she’s sexually adventurous, but she’s really not.” For another, the glamour is rather pathetic show; “Whenever a girlfriend asks where it’s from she says “I got it at the YSL sample sale.” ‘Saffron’ has, “just started university, moved to the East End, and want[s] to rip out her Surrey identity by the roots,” by proving just how trendy she is, “but it somehow doesn’t quite fit. Like her second hand vintage shoes; just half a size too big.” ‘Alex’, a successful businesswoman, “used to dress quirky until years of wearing a suit knocked it out of her.” She wears red lipstick to remind her about how crazy she once was but the fact that, “on rare nights to herself she secretly listens to weird entirely non-mainstream stuff,” does nothing to altar the impression that she’s consoling herself with a lost dream. Most powerful was a character an interviewee created called ‘Pat’ who feels like she’s just stepped off the set of EastEnders. A retired air stewardess, she, “walks around, fossilised in hairspray and immaculate in her shining cosmetic lacquer,” reminiscing about, “when she felt young and gorgeous and was exploring the world.” Every aspect of Pat’s life is show, from her surname, “taken from an edition of Who’s Who… so as not to bring the good name of the family down,” (Pat was illegitimate), to her, “structured clothing, shoulder pads, if she can find them and navy.” Ironically, the red lipstick mask, for all its power and controversy, can reveal in quite another way than that in which it was intended. There is only so far that we can go in controlling the way it is understood by others. When it comes to choosing a lipstick, the author has undeniable intent. The wealth of associations though, social, cultural and historical, that surround any lip colour mean that whether or not they succeed is quite another matter.