Bold Red Lips Are the Height of Fashion. But Girl, Did You Know They Started Out Thoroughly Disreputable? | QDaily Business History

Red lips did take a while to win respectability — about 4,950 years.

The old poets' ideal — rouge and powder brushed on lightly, a face as faint as spring blossoms — may have been a lie all along. By today's fashion, can you even leave the house without red lips?

In the film Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy, the heroine delivers a defiant speech: "I love wearing bold red lipstick — it's my choice. With red lips I feel more confident, and the whole world is watching me. It's a kind of allure, and more than that, a right."

The praise comes on rather steep, and the beauty of red lips is plainly the lesser point: claiming a right is the real goal — and that word runs through the entire evolution of the red lip. The lip look now considered the height of fashion spent a very long stretch of history outside what the public could accept. That it later won its way into more people's hearts was down to a few political movements.

In Mad Men, Ken Cosgrove, one of the agency's many bit-part ad salesmen, gets off a sneer of his own: "Red lipstick exists so a woman can be glowing when a man finally looks at her."

Yes, judgments of red lips always carry some male feedback in them. One view puts it flatly: a woman's full red lips are the shy sexual signal built into the human face.

That explains why, for most of its existence, red lipstick was treated as heresy in the world of makeup. In history it was almost always tied to women who sold sex.

A few alpha-type women, of course, could rise clear above conventional taste and carry it off.

Cleopatra herself, the ultimate icon of sex appeal, is said to have worn vivid red lips while winning over both Caesar and Mark Antony.

Interestingly, Elizabeth I, the Tudor Virgin Queen of English history, was a fan of bold red lips too. The queen obviously had no man to please. And though in 16th-century England red lips marked a woman as disreputable working-class riffraff, at court Elizabeth loved this avant-garde look of her age.

Elizabeth Taylor, who played Cleopatra

Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I, played by Cate Blanchett

Either way, for any object to travel from invention to mass adoption, mainstream society has to supply a few opinion leaders to nudge public sentiment along. Red lipstick began as disreputable, low-class and inelegant, but like luxury goods, it spread from the top down.

Still, you can't simply blame society for its intolerance. A society's taste usually takes a long time to come around.

Look back at the period and it becomes clear. In England in 1770, makeup of any kind was banned. The law held that it amounted to luring men.

Which is absurd. If men are drawn in and tripped up by beautiful things, what has that to do with women? In that distant, openly patriarchal society, could clever men really not tell a woman's natural coloring from the color of a fresh tomato?

At the French court of the same period, by contrast, red lips were the rage.

Eighteenth-century France had just come through the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, and the fine-grained Rococo style was at its height; courtiers dressed in elaborate, exaggerated fashion, and red lips were required equipment for any stylish court lady. In the more conservative England, people still held that "makeup is a kind of lie," and not until 1854 did England loosen its grip on red lips even slightly.

Around 1880 the actress Sarah Bernhardt showed off red lips in a fashion magazine. Women then still wouldn't go out in makeup. Bernhardt, famous at the time for playing the lead in Hamlet, brazenly put on red lips and walked out onto the street.

Luckily, the modern red-lipstick product had taken rough shape by then — reportedly already in stick form. So she didn't have to dig red paste out of a jar with a brush and dab it on her lips. Bernhardt excitedly called this red lipstick a "pen of love."

But that was Sarah Bernhardt, someone who stood outside her era to begin with.

Think of the clever women of novels and history — the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, or Catherine the Great of Russia. Women whom later writing shaped into figures who were smart, clear-eyed and out of step with their time. Bernhardt was one: she refused corsets, was willing to play men's roles on stage, and did things ordinary women neither did nor thought of doing.

The fact is, not every woman wanted to embrace the red-lip trend.

Lola Montez, the 19th-century beauty who captivated King Ludwig I of Bavaria, said that a woman who wore lipstick in that color was headed for ruin.

The prevailing view at the time still held that beauty came from within, and that the beauty of red lips borrowed an outside force — a symbol of power.

Which also explains how red lips became a symbol of feminism. At the 1912 women's suffrage march in New York City, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman both marched in bold red lips.

Red lips were soon read as standing for "women's freedom" — not in the sexual sense, but in the sense of liberty.

Next, these forward-looking women of the new era found a new color: they switched to a deeper red, which became the classic symbol of a challenge to patriarchal society. Worried that the challenge to male authority was going too far, New York around 1920 barred women from wearing lipstick of any color.

But the red-lip wave soon made a safe passage from one generation's political question to the next generation's question of taste. Some decided red lips carried no political meaning at all, and had nothing to do with words like "freedom," "domination" or "rebellion."

In the end, red lips were only a matter of beautiful or not.

Hitler, it's said, didn't appreciate the beauty of red lips either — more precisely, Hitler "hated red lips." Anyone calling on him was advised to "avoid the red-lip look."

Few people paid Hitler any mind. In the United States during World War II, and even in Britain, wearing colored lipstick became a patriotic duty for women — women were supposed to look beautiful and spirited, so that men fighting abroad had something to think of (which seems to circle right back to the thing feminists couldn't accept). It also settled the fact that nearly every lipstick was red.

The labels on the lipsticks of the day ran to "Auxiliary Red," "lipstick for women serving in wartime," "a Fighting Red — a brand-new lipstick color," and so on.

By around 1950, the red lip had become standard makeup. 98% of American women wore red lipstick out of the house, and no one called it an outrage anymore.

As the war ended, the adjectives attached to red lipstick quietly changed too. They no longer had anything to do with struggle; the descriptions turned plainly descriptive — "love that red." Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth and Elizabeth Taylor were all devoted fans of bold red lips.

Red lips were finally taken in by the general public as a form of beauty. In various years since, Vogue, ELLE and Cosmopolitan have all run rankings of the "10 most popular red lipstick brands." Dior, Chanel, Tom Ford, Lipstick Queen, MAC, NARS, Bobbi Brown, YSL and Rimmel all made the lists. Red lipstick could finally sit alongside clothes in the important pages of a fashion magazine.

Do the sums, and the red lip's climb from disreputable to the height of fashion did take a while — about 4,950 years.

None of which detracts from the beauty of red lips or their weight of meaning. They have a rare double life: for long stretches of history they were dismissed as a low-class look and dragged into talk about sex, and at the same time they could be raised high enough to help a group of people sing patriotic anthems and stake out a feminist political position.