The Red Lip: One Decision, Six Materials

Red on the mouth is the oldest cosmetic decision anyone still makes. It has been made with ground iron oxide, with safflower petals, with kermes, with cochineal, with bromo acid dyes and with silicone resin. The substance has been replaced almost completely. The gesture has not changed at all.

The deep background is pigment rather than lipstick. Ochre — iron oxide, in colours running from yellow through rust to deep red — was being collected, heated and ground at Blombos Cave on the South African coast around a hundred thousand years ago, in what the excavators describe as a processing workshop rather than a chance deposit.^[1] That is not evidence that anyone painted a mouth. It is evidence that people were making red on purpose, tens of thousands of years before anyone wrote down why.

The claim that lipstick is five thousand years old usually points at Sumer. Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur, running from 1922 into the 1930s, recovered cosmetic equipment from the graves of the Royal Cemetery, including cockle shells holding mineral pigment.^[2] The shells are real, the pigment is real, and people in southern Mesopotamia were unmistakably colouring themselves.

What does not come from the excavation is the recipe. The line repeated in almost every popular account — that Queen Puabi wore a lip colour compounded from white lead and crushed red stone — is a modern embellishment, copied from one retelling to the next until it reads like a finding. Woolley's report records the containers and the pigment in them. It does not record that formula, and it does not say which part of the face any of it was put on.^[2]

This is the pattern for the whole subject. The material evidence is good. The captions later attached to it are frequently invented, and the invented ones travel faster, because a recipe is more quotable than a shell with something in it.

Where a red came from decided who could wear it. In China the key plant was safflower, and the technique for extracting its red is set out in the Qimin Yaoshu, an agricultural manual compiled around 540 CE, which describes separating the flower's water-soluble yellow from the red that stays behind.^[3] The same plant reached Japan, where the pigment is called beni. A Tokyo firm founded at Kobuna-cho in Nihonbashi in 1825 still makes a safflower lip rouge, painted into a cup as an iridescent green film that turns scarlet under a wet brush.^[4]

In Europe the best reds were animal and expensive. Kermes came from insects living on the kermes oak; madder and brazilwood came from plants. After the Spanish conquest of Mexico in the 1520s, American cochineal gave a red far stronger than anything previously available, and the European dye trade reorganised itself around a single imported insect.^[5]

One story about the red lip circulates more widely than any of the true ones. In 1770, it is said, the British Parliament passed an act declaring that a woman who used cosmetics to lure a man into marriage could be tried for witchcraft and the marriage voided.

No such act exists. PolitiFact, which put the question to the United Kingdom's National Archives, found nothing of the kind in the statutes or in the parliamentary record. There is one real fragment underneath the story — a bill against painting, patches and immodest dress brought before the Commons in 1650 — and the Archives told PolitiFact that, as far as they could see, it never had a full reading.^[6]

The Witchcraft Act of 1735 ran the other way entirely. It repealed the earlier witchcraft statutes of England and Scotland and replaced the offence of witchcraft with a penalty for pretending to exercise witchcraft, sorcery, enchantment or conjuration: a law against claiming to be a witch rather than against being one.^[7]

The story survives because it is a good story, and because it flatters everyone who repeats it. A regulatory claim with no instrument, no jurisdiction and no date attached is not a fact about the law. It is a rumour wearing a date.

For most of its history lip colour was sold in a pot, a paper twist or a wrapped stick, and applied with a finger or a brush. Guerlain's archive dates a wax lip stick called Ne m'oubliez pas to 1870 and the house describes it as the first lipstick; that is a company's account of its own past, and the surviving descriptions of the object disagree with each other about its colour and its casing.^[8]

Metal cases are older than the standard account allows. The British firm behind Vinolia Lypsyl was selling a lip preparation in a metal tube no later than 1892; a Dorin catalogue of 1893 shows lipsticks in nickel cases, already with more than one mechanism for raising and lowering the stick; Bourjois was making cosmetic pencils by 1898. The most careful survey of the subject declines to name a first, and says the question is unknown and likely to stay that way.^[9]

Two later dates need separating. Scovill Manufacturing of Connecticut is generally credited with the first American metal case, and 1915 is the date usually attached to that credit. Maurice Levy, the name normally given as the inventor, appears in the record as an American investor who met the French cosmetics manufacturer Anthony Guash in New York that year, at a meeting arranged by a Scovill official, after which the two formed a company together. That is a business arrangement rather than an act of invention, and no patent filing by him has been produced.^[9] James Bruce Mason Jr of Nashville did file: an application of 17 July 1922, serial number 575,479, granted on 16 October 1923 as United States patent 1,470,994 under the title Toilet article.^[10] That is the screw mechanism still in use — a cup travelling on a threaded rod inside the casing, turned by a knurled base — and it arrived in a field already crowded with sliders, levers and screws rather than into an empty one.

What the case changed was not the colour but the habit. A cosmetic that can be reapplied in public, with one hand, at a table, is a different social object from one that needs a mirror and a closed door.^[11]

The Second World War attached the red lip to the state. The United States Marine Corps Women's Reserve was established in 1942, to free men for combat duty, and its director, Lieutenant Colonel Ruth Streeter, went to Elizabeth Arden that year and asked for a line of makeup made specifically for Women Marines. Streeter lobbied for an initial budget of three thousand dollars and negotiated the contract herself.^[12]

Arden already had a shade that matched the red piping and chevrons on the uniform, called Vibrant Red. In 1942 it was renamed Montezuma Red and became the standard-issue lipstick in the kit, with a matching cream rouge and nail polish. Every recruit was issued one in boot camp, along with instructions on how it was to be applied, and was expected to take no more than two minutes over it. When the first kit ran out, a replacement cost $2.27 at the PX.^[12]

The grooming standard was enforced rather than suggested. Women Marines were five times more likely than men to pick up a non-judicial punishment for a dress-code violation, and the usual penalty was restriction to base or a cancelled liberty; Bernice Frankel, later known as Bea Arthur, collected two of them as a private in 1943.^[12]

A second shade is often folded into this story and should not be. Helena Rubinstein's Regimental Red dates from 1941, and was hers — not Arden's, and not the Marine Corps'. Rubinstein also sold Fighting Red, Commando and Jeep Red. Where a published account dates Montezuma Red to 1941, it has almost always slid one house's product onto another's.^[12] The broader point survives the confusion: cosmetics were part of regulated appearance for American servicewomen, and the industry sold a great deal on the strength of it.^[13]

Hazel Bishop, a chemist, put a long-wearing lipstick on sale in 1950 built on bromo acids — dyes that stain the lip rather than sitting on top of it — cut with lanolin to offset how harsh they were. Reported sales rose from under fifty thousand dollars in 1950 to more than ten million in 1953, and the industry spent the following decades chasing the same property.^[14]

The modern answer is a film rather than a stain. A volatile solvent carries a film former onto the lip, evaporates, and leaves the colour locked into what is left behind. Revlon's transfer-resistance patent, granted in 1996, builds that film from a silicone ester wax at three to ten per cent, carried in a volatile blend of cyclic silicones and C8-to-C20 isoparaffins in a ratio of about one to one up to four to one.^[15] Procter and Gamble's, with a priority date of November 1995, names the pair most long-wear liquid lipsticks still use: isododecane as the volatile hydrocarbon, and an MQ silicone resin — trimethylsiloxysilicate — as the film former.^[16]

The colour itself is often still an insect. Carmine, from cochineal, remains in wide use. A final rule published on 5 January 2009 required cochineal extract and carmine to be declared by name on food and cosmetic labels in the United States, instead of being covered by a general colour term, following reports of allergic reactions.^[17] The requirement took effect two years later, on 5 January 2011.^[18]