Dark lip is the only fashion statement you need to make for 2016
‘Insensitive to red,” a heartbreaking phrase, is technically a description of early black-and-white film, which converted the colours of blood and red lipstick to black.
Elsa Lanchester’s lips were painted redder than her auburn hair for the 1935s The Bride of Frankenstein; the makeup artist on the film based her look on a 3,300-year-old bust of Nefertiti, who announced her power by blackening her eyes, reddening her lips and dyeing her nails with dark henna.
However, when Lanchester appeared on screen as the Bride — “She’s alive!” — her overdrawn mouth looked dark as hell: Et voilà, the modern gothic lip was born. Robert Smith of the Cure, whose lipstick emphasised not the Cupid’s bow but the corners of his mouth, giving him the moue of a dissatisfied cannibal, was said to inspire the almost-black ‘goth lip’ of the 1990s; he only, in fact, wore the 60s designer Mary Quant’s Crimson Scorcher.
But what are facts when it comes to what we see? Colour depends on perception, and our perception, so dependent on lighting, changes over the years the way light does over the course of a day.
Sometimes we’re desensitized to red, and so to get a look as fresh as red lipstick used to give, we turn to shades that look more like ink.
In 1994, the most iconic nail and then lip colour of the decade, Chanel’s Vamp, was created from scratch: Cosmetics director Dominique Moncourtois layered black magic marker over models’ red nails and sealed it with gloss, apparently to make the polish pop in black-and-white photos (where red looks dark or dull, a blackened red looks bright).
Editors loved it so much that Chanel made it a product, then a trend.
“Sensing that women may use lipstick to evoke outlaw images that their workaday world won’t abide,” explained Elizabeth Wurtzel in her 1998 manifesto, Bitch, the beauty business took to naming shades after old ideas of the bad girl: Vixen; Wicked; Racy.
In the 1995 video for No Doubt’s ‘Don’t Speak’, Gwen Stefani wore Urban Decay’s Gash, a colour like dried blood on lace. Marilyn Manson became obsessed with Diva, a similar shade by Mac, which he mixed with black eyeliner.
Whatever badness may have lain in these colours has been lost in fashion’s current 90s revival, which seems to be lasting longer than the actual 90s.
We’re insensitive to red again, yet the new iterations of ‘gothic’ lipstick, more velvety than matte, are named not for sins but for indulgences, and seem intended for hiding nothing worse than a third glass of pinot.
Models at the autumn 2016 Rodarte show wore a Nars shade of aubergine called train bleu, as in the Belle Époque train that went up the French Riviera, now the name of a restaurant at Gare de Lyon.
A gorgeous new bullet from Bite Beauty that on me looks like shades of a sex bruise is called nori, as in Japanese seaweed, and another that looks like a vial of venous blood, is called liquorice.
A Lipstick Queen shade named bête noire promises, per the press release, a “warm, blackberry tone” with “no hint of goth”.
The closest you can get to the suggestion of bad taste is Bruised Plum, a lipstick by the absolute king of ‘em, Tom Ford.
However, I can still go and pay a couple of euro for Vamp It Up, an old-school tube of Wet ‘n’ Wild, worn by the goth girls of my youth. It’s the colour of purple velvet in a black-walled nightclub and goes on like an oil pastel, and I rub it a little outside my lip line so my mouth doesn’t look too hard.
I go to a downtown pizzeria wearing a black slip — not a slip dress, but a slip sans dress — and silver stilettos, which I take off to walk catlike along the curb of the sidewalk.
I ask a man at the bar what he thinks of my lipstick. He hadn’t thought anything, he claims. His insensitivities must be very developed. I appeal to the waiter, also a man, who says: “It looks really, really red.” It’s not red. Then again, he’s not wrong.
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