Painting The Lips Red: Thoughts on Red Lips

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Well, with February coming to a close and Valentine’s Day already feeling like an eternity behind us, with Christmas basically a distant memory, it seems like a weird time for me to be writing about red lips. Like, Ale, we’re about to enter Spring; we have pastels for Easter and green for St. Patrick’s Day to look forward to. Why are you bringing up red lips? To which I reply, I’ve just been thinking about them a lot recently, especially after watching Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s makeup tutorial on Youtube, which had been sitting in my “Watch Later” folder for months. Like AOC, I love a good red lip; some of my earliest memories involve me going into my grandmother’s makeup stash and applying her signature shiny red lipstick to look like her. As a four-year-old, I thought that as an adult, I would be wearing red lipstick every day, like my grandmother, and could not wait to be an adult so I could do that.

Reality, however, is quite different. I usually reserve the red lipstick for special occasions, performances, or going out; I’ve never worn red lipstick to class or on a day that I was just “hanging out.” Usually, there was some sort of occasion, even if it was just going downtown or out to dinner. Then I started thinking: why don’t I wear red lipstick all the time? It’s not like I don’t like it; every time I wear red lipstick, I feel powerful and confident and ready to take on the world, but it’s something more. When thinking about my article on uniforms, I realized that it goes back to not wanting to stand out too much. I exist in a weird limbo of wanting to be noticed for looking cute in my makeup but not wanting to draw attention to myself. And red lipstick is quite literally a bright red attention-grabber.

Then I started thinking about why I wear makeup at all; I wear it for myself, that much is evident by the lipstick and foundation stains in my mask at the end of each day, even if no one sees the full look except my roommates and me. So, if I’m just wearing the makeup for myself, why should it matter what people think about my red-painted lips? I guess that makes sense in theory, but in practice, that’s where it gets complicated, and it all goes back to me wanting to be noticed but not wanting to stand out.

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But then I think: my grandmother wears red lipstick every day, and it’s nothing out of the ordinary since we’re so used to it, so if I were to wear red lipstick often, would people just not even give it a second thought? I suppose so, but what about the first few times? That’s the hardest part, I think. When you start doing what you want or wearing what you want, people around you will notice, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Life is too short to not wear what you want, and think of your four-year-old self who was so excited to be an adult and wear red lipstick every day. I’m sure she would smile at you widely with her lipstick-stained teeth.

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