The Undeniable Power of Red Lipstick

When I was twenty, my mother gifted me a stick of Mac Red lipstick for Christmas.

She was a historically expert gift-giver, but when I unwrapped the tiny present, I knew she had missed the mark.

Women fell into one of two categories. There were those bold enough to pull off red lipstick and those who knew better than to try.

It went without saying that I fell into the latter category. Red lipstick was for other women–other, more fabulous women.

It was for my mother, a serial red lipstick-wearer and the type of person who lights up a room when she walks in. Red just makes sense on her. She could wear red lipstick because she always had.

So could those other women who wore red lipstick, because they were inherently glamorous. They were mythical creatures, undoubtedly sexy and beautiful. They were unafraid of this bright, bold, look-at-me color, because they were worthy of being looked at.

I was neither glamorous nor bold. Beautiful and sexy were words that belonged in someone else’s vocabulary. Not to mention, I had nowhere to wear red lipstick, because clearly you had to be going somewhere for that sort of thing. I was a college student whose most important event was class.

Given the overwhelming evidence that I was ill suited for it, I buried that tube of Mac Red deep in my makeup bag. One thing was for certain: that lipstick would never see the light of day. Mom, for once in her life, had gotten it wrong. Red was everything I wasn’t.

The lipstick remained there for several months, nestled amongst mascara and eyeliner, entirely ignored.

That is, until one fateful night when I was getting ready to go out with my girlfriends.

Noticing the red lipstick abandoned amongst my other cosmetics, I threw caution to the wind. I may not have been a glamour queen worthy of wearing red lipstick, but in a moment of reckless daring, I decided I could fake it for a few hours.

I filled in my lips, lined my Cupid’s bow, and headed out with my girlfriends.

Something peculiar happened.

Nobody saw through me. No one accused me of lacking the glamour required for such a statement. Nobody told me red was not for me.

In fact, more than a friend or two told me how good I looked in red.

It was a watershed moment.

Realizing no one had called my bluff, I began to test the waters and let that tube of lipstick out to play.

Its appearance was initially limited to long nights exercising my newfound right to enjoy the bars. Its purpose seemed best served on those occasions, an aid to fun in the dwindling days of my college career.

Red lips found a place in my life for the first time in the context of this merrymaking. With adulthood looming on the horizon, I was anything but confident, yet those swipes of red emboldened me.

I began to understand that there was something behind red lipstick.

It makes you feel things. It makes you different somehow.

College graduation came and went, and a few months later, I boarded a plane to Spain to teach English. Spain is where my red lipstick habit, which until then had been reserved strictly for bars and dancing and nights out, seeped into everyday life. After all, if any place demands red lipstick on the regular, it’s Spain.

While conservative in many regards, the land of flamenco and sunshine and late nights is a country that accepts women who adorn their bodies however they please.

Accepted are the grandmothers who dye their hair five shades of purple. So are the middle-aged mothers who bare their post-baby breasts at the beach without a care in the world. Also accepted are the women of all shapes and sizes who don crop tops and short shorts in the summer, unconcerned about whether or not they have “the body for it.”

Spain allowed me to fully buy into the idea that I could be whatever type of woman I wanted, just as I realized that this was something I would have to decide.

I wanted to be a woman who wore red lipstick, and being in Spain made me realize I needed no one’s permission for this.

Buoyed by this culture of acceptance, applying a coat of red lipstick became part of my morning routine. It was the way I armed myself against the unknown in a foreign country, day in and day out.

It became my shield as I explored what it meant to be completely independent for the first time in my life.

I made discoveries.

I discovered the previously unknown feeling of butterflies in my stomach and shortness of breath, sensations that accompanied stealing kisses from someone whose lips matched mine perfectly.

In retrospect, he was completely wrong for me, but it was my first lesson about the disconnect that exists between the heart and the brain. He had a face like an angel and no one had ever looked at me like that before.

He told me all the time that I was too beautiful.

Eres demasiado guapa.

One day, as we sat in a quiet plaza, reveling in one another’s perfectness, he contemplated me, his fingers lightly caressing my face.

“You’re too beautiful,” he told me, for what seemed like the thousandth time.

He hesitated as he traced the outline of my lips with his fingers, on the verge of an unsolicited addendum.

“You know what my friends say about you? They say it seems like you know too much. You know, because of your red lips.”

Dicen que sabes demasiado.

He was unable to give me further explanation about what it meant to know too much. But I understood what he was saying.

Women’s lips are highly sexual and highly visible. In a world where being overtly sexual is still a liability for women, those who choose to highlight their lips with loud colors proclaim their indifference to this liability.

“Knowing too much” was a roundabout way of saying that red lipstick made me aggressively sexual–too sexual for Angel Face’s comfort. “Knowing too much” tapped into this idea that women should present themselves in just the right way, and that I, because I chose to highlight this sensual part of my body, had crossed the line.

Men are taught that women exist to be their sexual playthings, but at the same time, women are reprimanded for being overtly sexual.

Men are taught to be dominant and women submissive, because women exist for men’s consumption.

“Knowing too much” was my first lesson that red lips challenge these notions.

A woman who wears red lipstick asserts herself and her freedom to make her own choices.

Yes, I am featuring this sensual part of my body. Yes, I am aware of its boldness. And no, I don’t care what you think.

I exist independently of your perceived right to consume me.

At its core, the act of wearing red lipstick is a proclamation that a woman’s sexuality is hers and hers alone. Any discomfort you have about that is your problem, not hers.

Taking up the mantle of “woman who wears red lipstick” required courage, and not just the courage to convince myself I was worthy.

I had to summon courage to deal with being told that red lipstick made me intimidating. And again in the face of proclamations that red was “a bit much” for me. And yet again when I was deemed “too sweet” for such a provocative color.

A Google search about red lipstick in the workplace reveals society’s issue with dominant, sexually assertive women. There are pages and pages of articles dedicated to discussion about whether or not to wear red lipstick to an interview, what kind of message this color communicates at work, and if it’s appropriate.

Appropriate?

We’re hardly talking about baring cleavage and wearing miniskirts to work.

If you really want to know how society sees women, ask Google if red lipstick is appropriate for the workplace. Even now, at the height of the #metoo era, women still must be worried about men viewing them in the “correct” manner and catering to this ideal–being seen as attractive, but not highly sexual; confident, but not domineering; modest, but not prude.

And the verdict is still out as to whether or not red lipstick toes this finicky line.

Taking up this mantle, which required hitherto unknown courage, gave me power.

Which is why, aside from the fact that I love the way the color looks on me, I continue to wear red lipstick anywhere and everywhere. It took me long enough to feel worthy enough that I refuse to change my habits simply because a man might view me too sexually, too confidently, too aggressively, too whatever.

I look fabulous in red. And if it’s too much for you, if you think I’d look “sweeter” in a more demure color, if you’d rather I was less intimidating, guess what?

I couldn’t care less what you think.

For as much as I saw myself as unworthy of red lipstick, at some point, without conscious thought, the opposite became unequivocally true.

Red lips became my trademark.

“Now I understand where you get it,” was the comment a friend left on a Facebook photo of my mother, my grandmother, and me. The three of us beamed in the photo, all flaunting defiantly red lips. “You come from a long line of red lips.”

It’s true. As evidenced by the photo, the women in my family do seem to have a penchant for red lipstick. What is less true, wrong really, is that it’s necessary to “get” this quality from somewhere. There is no pre-requisite for being part of that group, no need to come from a dynasty of red lips in order to wear the color. The act itself of putting on red lipstick is what confers the title, nothing more.

You needn’t be glamorous to wear it; you are glamorous because you wear it.

You needn’t be confident to wear it; you are confident because you wear it.

You needn’t ask permission; the only person’s permission you need to dress and express yourself as you please is your own.

The tube of red lipstick nestled in my cosmetics bag is my superman cape.

It’s my superman cape at work, where high school freshmen occasionally feel they have the right to come onto me because they like the way I look.

It’s my superman cape in a world that sees fit to pay women less than “the lucky people with dicks,” to use Jennifer Lawrence’s words.

It’s my superman cape on the street, where I, along with countless other women, endure unwanted advances, grotesque catcalls, and generally unpleasant interactions with men who are praised for this harassment.

In other words, red lipstick is a small luxury afforded women in a world constantly reminding us of our inferiority.

IT had been a long day.

I neared the end of a twelve-hour shift spent entirely on my feet and noticed a customer looking at me with a playful grin.

That look was all too common. Plentiful were the brazen, off-the-wall comments I received working with the public that I knew immediately one was on the way.

I braced myself for the onslaught.

“Girl,” he purred in a southern drawl, eyeing me curiously, “where do you think you’re goin’ with them red lips?”

Where did I think I was going?

As if I needed to justify myself to him.

As if his opinion mattered.

As if wearing red lipstick at work was some mischievous act I had to explain.

His judgment caught me off guard, yet I responded without hesitation.

“Who ever said you have to be going somewhere to wear red lipstick?”

Wearing red lipstick is not about where you’re going. It’s about who you want to be.

So thanks for knowing this, Mom, and thanks for spending the $17.50 it cost to bring me into the fold. It’s funny to think that seventeen dollars and fifty cents is all it costs to make me feel sexy, badass, and confident every day of my life.

And that’s just something you can’t put a price on.