A simple swipe of the red lipstick can do what many other things can’t. Or maybe they can, but they cost far, far more.

A tube of red lipstick, for example, can often do what a pair of Louboutins on your feet or that dazzling stone around your neck does. Or more. Which beauty worth her name has dared to give red lipstick a miss?

To look at the women who wore red lipstick most famously is to go through a roll-call of the most glamorous in 
Hollywood and elsewhere.

Marlene Dietrich paired crimson lips with her superthin high-arching brows. Rita Hayworth wore red lipstick too.

A little later it would become inevitable on Elizabeth Taylor, who used red on her lips to accentuate the drama of her eyes.  “Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick, and pull yourself together,” was what she had advised. (It works.) And what would Marilyn Monroe be without her red pout (or the other way round?)

Later Madonna would make a great statement with her red lips, as she would with much else. In her “Like a Virgin” days, she painted her lips a shocking red as an ironic comment on her Catholic get-up. She even has her own official red lip colour. Created with Gina Brooke, Madonna’s makeup artist, and Make Up For Ever, Aqua Rouge #8 was created especially for Madonna.

Red lipstick turned Angelina Jolie’s mouth into a sexy gash; it appeared on J Lo, Penelope Cruz, Nicole Kidman, Anne Hathaway, Gwen Stefani; and now it is on the lips of Beyonce, Rihanna and Taylor Swift.

Red lipstick is eternal.

In this part of the world, red lipstick was worn by Gayatri Devi, Rekha and Simi Grewal. Priyanka Chopra is often seen sporting a full, red mouth.  

But it has not been easy for red lipstick. It has had to struggle to be where it is today.

Red lips were desirable for women, sometimes for men too, from the beginning of history.  

Mesopotamian women (and men, too) are said to have coloured their lips with crushed semi-precious stones. Cleopatra apparently crushed beetles and ants to get the red of her lips.

In India, women wore alaktaka, a liquid dye of lac, on their lips. Or smeared their lips with betel leaf juice.  

Egyptian practices  apparently led to the phrase the “Kiss Of Death”. Ancient Egyptians mixed fucus-algin, iodine and bromine mannite, which women wore on their lips and which could even cause death.  

Cut to the next great woman celeb from history who wore red lips. Queen Elizabeth 1 wore a pale white face and bright crimson lips. She got her lip paint from a mix of beeswax and herbs.

Soon cosmetics, particularly lip colour, would face backlash. In the 18th century England turned censorious towards cosmetics. Things did not improve in the Victorian times either. Make-up was considered impolite, if not disreputable in women.

Not so in France. A Frenchwoman, the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, was wearing red lipstick and even applying it in public. About the same time, the lipstick proper was first advertised in the US in the Sears Roebuck Catalog.

By the 1940s, red lipstick had taken its hold on women’s lips.

What is it about women and red lipstick? What is it that women try to say about ourselves? 

♦ Model: Madhuja Aditya Choudhuri 

♦ Make-up: Prianka Jaiin 

♦ Photographer: Baban Mukherjee

♦ Creative direction: Nick Rampal