Lip service

Say what you want about high heels. For me, the defining external hallmark of femininity is the painted lip. Most little girls reach for Mommy’s lipstick as soon as they can toddle.

When I spent babysitting money on my first lipstick at 14—a totally inappropriate go-go girl pink–I insisted it made me look like Marlo Thomas. That first shaky smear of frosty pink on my lips had me trembling on the threshold of womanhood. There’s something so uniquely feminine about applying lipstick–it’s power in a pot. I got it.

At 16, a cool Latina classmate named Elana (my high school’s answer to the Girl from Ipanema) took me aside one day and asked me why I never wore a decent lipstick. Ignoring the slam because I was so flattered she even spoke to me, I shrugged. She whipped a Yardley Pot O’ Gloss out of her embroidered jeans pocket and ordered me to try it. It was a vivid apple red and smelled like heaven. I dipped my pinkie into the shimmering, fragrant goo and dabbed some on. Elana approved. “Finally,” she said. Ignoring the further insult, I took a look in the girl’s room mirror and realized, by jingo, I looked like Ginger Rogers. After school, I trekked to the People’s Drug Store to stock up.

After Elana’s tough love tutorial, I wore nothing on my lips but this lusciously perfumed lip gloss—especially the dark, dramatic colors like Walnut, Astral Wine, and Pomegranate. That was the year I became known for my wide-legged, high-waisted trousers, small, tight sweaters, suede peep-toe wedgies, Mom’s 1950’s fake fur chubby, and gleaming red, red, RED lips. I had learned a secret of the harem and never looked back.

Gloss-ary

Sold? Here are a few tips for perfect red lips from my theater costumer-makeup gal/image consultant days (long story for another blog post).

Brush: If you’ve been globbing on your lipstick willy-nilly, it’s time to get serious. First, get a decent lip brush. Brace your pinky on your chin to steady your hand. Outline your lips, starting with their highest point. Take the line from center to your lip corner on one side, then from center to the other. Fill in with small strokes. Voila!  

Blot: Apply a coat of lipstick, then blot off the surplus by pressing lips onto a tissue. For super-long-lasting lipcolor, after blotting, dust lips with light coat of translucent powder, apply lipstick over this, blot again.

• Pro tip: To keep lipstick off your teeth—a common rookie error–-just pop your finger into your rouged mouth, close your lips around it, and draw your finger out. The extra color will be on your finger, not your teeth. I learned this little trick in a lady’s room one evening and would have kissed my benefactress but our lips looked so perfect, I couldn’t take the chance.

Beware: If you’ve seen the 1950’s Marilyn Monroe flick Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, you’ve seen the most compelling advertisement ever made for the power of lipstick. I defy any red-blooded American gal to watch that movie and not want to run up to Rite-Aid and plunk down $8 for a tube of Revlon’s Love That Red or Fire n’ Ice. But hold up…reds, while universally flattering, take a bit of experimentation. Generally speaking, Snow White-style brunettes, blue or gray-eyed brownettes, and alabaster-skinned Scandinavian blondes do well with deep blue-reds (with cherry or fuchsia undertones). Golden-skinned brownettes, tawny redheads, and honey blondes do better with coral reds.

Best bet: Go to Sephora and start playing around. When it’s right, you’ll know it. Your teeth will look whiter, your eyes will sparkle, your skin will glow. My current go-to red is London-based Lisa Eldridge’s Luxuriously Lucent Spirited Away.

My dear friend and makeup maven Donna and I once spent a merry weekend immersed in 1970’s Seventeen magazines. The inevitable result? A serious craving for chunky-heeled loafers and Yardley’s Pot O Gloss. The upshot of that initial conversation has been a decades-long search for a reasonable substitute for this now-defunct lippie. (Latest contenders: Rimmel’s Stay Glossy for drugstore prices or splurge with Lisa Eldridge’s Gloss Embrace.)

BTW, Donna’s a brilliant beauty/women’s lifestyle blogger and her many loving homages to lipstick are classics. Here’s my favorite. Read it, then go out and find your perfect scarlet, crimson, ruby or cherry.  

You never know what might happen when you giftwrap your words in red.

“You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you.” Song of Solomon 4:7