Red is the colour of February’s holiday of love and has long been associated with the sexy, the powerful and the feminine. A red lip is never out of style. It is always a confidence booster. It can also be a Pavlovian signal: it certainly is for my husband, who never notices my haircut or the expensive new nude lipstick I carefully selected, but always compliments and appreciates a red lip. It subtly demonstrates I’m making an effort.
The allure of red lips goes back a long way – to Mesopotamia in 3500 BC, when nobles wore lip tint made from crushed red rock – and has resurfaced over the centuries since. From the Han Dynasty from 300 BC on, vermilion pigment mixed with beeswax adorned the lips of both men and women. In 18th-century France, the craze at the court was for red lips painted with animal fat and beetroot colouring. It is the mark of a fully fledged geisha in Japan to adorn herself with a red lip. But it was the early decades of the 20th century when bold red lips took on a modern symbolism. We hear a lot about suffragette white, but there was also suffragette red: red lips came to symbolize defiance. Jumping on this bandwagon, Canadian-born beauty entrepreneur Elizabeth Arden handed out tubes of her lipstick to suffragettes marching on Fifth Avenue in New York. Later, during the Second World War, red lips were deployed to take a stand against Nazism, as Hitler, apparently, hated cosmetics and especially red lips, preferring the Aryan ideal of a freshly scrubbed face. Arden is part of this story, too, producing a line called Montezuma Red for lips, nails and blush for women who joined the support ranks.
To get the 21st-century take on the look, I spoke to makeup artist Jukka Suutari, who works in fashion, film and TV, from Canada’s Drag Race to The Great Canadian Baking Show, and with celeb clients such as Elle Macpherson and Annie Murphy. To him, a classic red lip is a sign of strength, femininity and sophistication. Don’t let anyone tell you you are ever too old for a red lip; Suutari is a fan of the look on women of every age. His go-to celebrity references range from Old Hollywood – Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Elisabeth Taylor – to modern-day beauties such as human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, burlesque star Dita Von Teese and actresses Salma Hayek, Angelina Jolie, Helen Mirren and Tracee Ellis Ross. But his favourite examples are (the late) designer Iris Apfel, the iconic soul-funk-jazz artist Sade and model Carmen Dell’Orefice, who still rocks scarlet lips at age 93.