The oldest artifact pointing to people coloring their lips is believed to date from 3500 BCE; in ancient Egypt, women also accentuated their lips. In the era of Nefertiti, the valuable coloring was kept in small containers. The Japanese and Greeks tinted their lips using a mixture of wax, vegetable dyes and other mysterious ingredients, which often proved fatal. Perhaps for this reason, Catherine the Great turned to a more “natural” remedy — she commanded her ladies-in-waiting to apply suction to her lips using their own mouths. She didn’t complain about minor bites as long as the procedure resulted in red, full lips.
The first lipstick
Not until 1883 did two Frenchmen have the brilliant idea of making the time-honored red paste easier to use. They added castor oil to the red ointment and made the mixture more firm using beeswax and deer tallow. The substance was rolled into small sticks and wrapped in tissue paper – and lipstick was born. It was presented to the broader public for the first time at the 1883 World Fair in Amsterdam. However, it was not a major success at first. The high price of the first lipstick may have been responsible, or the fact that the lipstick tended to melt, discoloring the inside of a lady’s handbag. In addition, lipstick was considered slightly indecent. Indeed, at the beginning people just couldn’t warm to the idea of the saucisses (little sausages), which they found awkward and which reminded them of children's crayons, yet were as expensive as an entire set of professional oil pastels.
Red is the ultimate signal color. © Graça Victoria - Fotolia.com, © Smalik - Fotolia.com, © gulnara khaliqova - Fotolia.comThe breakthrough comes at last
The ice was not truly broken until the 1920s. Film stars ushered in a new era of popularity for red lips. The trendsetter was the famous actor Sarah Bernhardt, who frivolously referred to lipstick as a stylo d’amour (love pen). Following the example she set in her silent films, women began giving themselves small, dark red mouths, known as bee-stung lips. Later, as sound and color came to film, wide, bright red lips came into fashion. The final breakthrough came with the retractable lipstick tube, which was brought to Germany by Americans in 1948 following World War II. This volkslippenstift (people’s lipstick) could be purchased for 1.50 deutschmarks; in the GDR there was an even more inexpensive model in a plastic tube, costing only a few cents.
Today, women around the world spend a total of nearly 600 million dollars on lipstick and an additional 150 million on its shiny, sparkly cousin, lip gloss. Lipstick has become a common commodity, but it can still be provocative. For example, the lips can be colored black to show a clear rejection of social conventions. Red has always been the most titillating color, and also serves as a kind of signal.
An ever changing play of colors
In the 1960s, warm, radiant colors were all the rage, followed in the seventies by colorful candy tones. In the 1980s, you could choose between cool shades and neon pinks. Today, anything goes – and lipstick has become a truly high-tech product that offers more than just long-lasting color and smooth application. Cosmetic companies advertise “networks of moisturizing capsules and polymers,” “reflective pigments” or tiny pearls that automatically release new color whenever the lips are pressed together.
In other words, spending three to 50 euros on a new lipstick is therefore still a worthwhile investment, even if 65 percent of the color is destined to end up on shirt collars, rims of glasses … or on someone’s neck.