There's Nothing More Festive Than Your Red Lipstick
Updated: Sep 5
Why one small tube does more for a December evening than anything hanging in your wardrobe.
The baubles are up, the mulled wine is on, and you are standing in front of your wardrobe forty minutes before you need to leave, thinking that nothing in it feels like Christmas.
Before you take anything off the rail, there's one small thing that will do more for how you feel this evening than the dress will. It fits in your handbag and it takes ten seconds.
Why red lipstick feels like too much
I hear the same two sentences constantly. Magda, red is a bit much for me. Or, I haven't worn red since my twenties.
I understand both of them. Red is loud, it makes a claim, and it draws the eye whether you meant it to or not. That is exactly what makes it useful in December, when everything around you is already sparkling and nobody is being subtle.
Red lipstick doesn't decorate the season. It belongs to it, in a tube you can carry.
The history of red lipstick, from Cleopatra to the suffragettes
Women have been putting red on their lips for something like five thousand years. The Sumerians crushed gemstones for it. Cleopatra is said to have made hers from crushed insects, fish scales and beeswax, which is not something I'd suggest trying, though the intention behind it is the one you'd recognise. To be seen. To signal something. To feel beautiful.
Elizabeth I loved a bright red lip and believed it had healing properties. There's a much repeated story that in the 1770s the English parliament passed a law allowing a marriage to be annulled if the bride had worn lipstick to win her husband, on the grounds of witchcraft. I've never seen anyone produce the statute, so I'd file it under good story rather than fact, but it tells you how much the colour bothered people.
What isn't in doubt is what happened in 1912. When the suffragettes marched in New York, red lipstick was on their mouths as a deliberate signal, and Elizabeth Arden is said to have handed tubes of it out from her salon on Fifth Avenue. It became a way of being visible on purpose.
Then the Second World War, when red lipstick became close to a uniform. Cosmetic houses released shades called Victory Red and Fighting Red, and for women serving in the American forces it was part of the regulation kit. A colour that had been called vulgar thirty years earlier was suddenly patriotic.
The thread running through all of it is the same. Women reached for red at the moments they refused to be overlooked.
Why the colour red gets noticed
Red has the longest wavelength your eye can see, and it reliably pulls attention faster than the colours around it. That much is settled. It's why stop signs are red and why your eye finds the one woman in a red coat across a crowded room.
What red then means is a different question, and the research on it is more interesting than the version you usually read in beauty magazines. Andrew Elliot at the University of Rochester has spent years on this, and his colour-in-context theory says the effect of red depends entirely on the situation it appears in. Red in a romantic setting works one way. Red in a competitive or examination setting has been linked to the opposite, to caution and avoidance.
His own studies found something worth knowing before you buy a red lipstick for a board meeting. Red shifted how attractive women were rated. It did not shift how they were rated for intelligence or kindness. So if anyone tells you red lipstick makes you read as more competent, the research doesn't say that.
Which is the honest version, and I think it's the better one. Red gets you noticed. What it says about you is decided by the room and by the woman wearing it, never by the lipstick.
That's the whole principle I work on with clients, and it's why I don't hand anyone a rule.
Why red lipstick works at Christmas
In December you're surrounded by the colour anyway. Wrapping paper, ribbon, crackers, poinsettias, the tin of biscuits nobody opens. Wearing red in that setting doesn't jar, it sits inside what's already there.
Which is why it does so much work for so little effort. A plain jumper, almost no other makeup, and a red mouth, and you are dressed for a party, a family lunch or an office thing you'd forgotten about. You don't need a smoky eye as well. The lip is doing it.
It's also more forgiving than women expect. The worry is that a strong colour will draw attention to everything you'd rather it didn't. In practice the eye goes to the red and stays there, and the tiredness under your eyes stops being the first thing anyone sees.
How to find the right red for your undertone
"Magda, I've tried red and it looked awful on me". I hear that one constantly too, and it's almost always the same problem. There isn't one red. There are hundreds, and the one you tried belonged to somebody else's colouring.
The thing that decides it is your undertone.
Cool undertones, meaning pink, blue or violet in the skin, sit best with blue-based reds. Think cherry and berry rather than brick.
Warm undertones, meaning golden, peachy or yellow, want a red with orange or coral underneath it. Tomato rather than raspberry.
If you don't know yours yet, start with a true red that sits between the two. Dior 999 is the reliable one, the proper Father Christmas red, and it flatters almost everybody. Begin there and work outwards once you know which direction suits you.
Red lipstick as part of your Visual Voice
Your Visual Voice® has nothing to do with what's in fashion this month. It's what you look like when you've stopped consulting anybody else about it.
Once you've found your own red, it becomes part of that. It says you're here and you're not hiding, and it says it before you've spoken to anyone.
Ask yourself how you actually want to feel over the holidays. Not how you assume you're supposed to feel by the twenty-third. Elegant, playful, bold, quietly pleased to be there. Your red can carry that in one small detail, and when it's genuinely yours you won't feel like you're in costume. You'll just feel like yourself, slightly more so.
The ritual of putting it on
There's something close to meditative in applying it. You stand at the mirror, you steady your hand, you follow your lip line, you press your lips together, you check.
Nothing about you has changed in those thirty seconds. What's changed is that you gave yourself permission, and most women I work with can feel the difference the moment they look up.
In a December that's mostly logistics, that half minute is one of the few you spend on yourself. It's a small thing to hold on to when you're doing three people's Christmas at once.
Seven tips for wearing red lipstick
Prepare your lips. Exfoliate gently and moisturise. Red shows every dry patch, so smooth lips make more difference than an expensive formula.
Use a liner in the same shade. This isn't fussiness. It stops the colour bleeding at the edges and it makes the whole thing last hours longer.
Start in the middle. Apply to the centre of your lips and work out towards the corners. You get far more control that way.
Blot, then go again. One coat, press a tissue over it, second coat. It survives dinner that way.
Keep everything else quiet. With a strong lip you need mascara and tidy brows and very little else.
Put it in your bag. Even the best formula wants a refresh after a meal.
Wear it like you meant it. If you feel conspicuous, give it ten minutes. The feeling goes, and then you catch yourself in a window and smile.
Wear it on a Tuesday, not only at the party
Here's what I'd like you to do this December, whether you've worn red for thirty years or not since 1998. Put it on.
Go to a counter and take your time over it. Don't let anyone talk you into their favourite. You'll know when you've got the right one, because there's a small lift when you look up, and that lift is the only test that matters.
Then wear it to the party, and to your mother's, and to the supermarket on a wet Tuesday when nobody is looking. That last one is the one I care about. What a room decides about you is one thing. What you decide about yourself on an ordinary morning is a different thing entirely, and it's yours.
Red lipstick has no opinion about whether the house is tidy or the mince pies caught. It doesn't mind that you're fifty-five rather than twenty-five, or that you're wearing last year's dress. It only wants you to catch your reflection and be pleased.
The gift you give yourself
December is weeks of thinking about what other people would like. Family, friends, colleagues, the neighbour who takes in your parcels. Somewhere in all of it, the question of what you're giving yourself tends not to come up.
A red you actually love is a decent answer, and not because of what it costs. There's a good one at every price. It's because you'll reach for it two hundred times over the next year, and every time you do you're saying something quiet to yourself about being worth the thirty seconds.
So this Christmas, when you put it on, look properly rather than glancing. Still here. Still yourself. Ready for whatever the evening turns out to be.
Because there really is nothing more festive than your red lipstick, and the woman wearing it.
Happy Christmas, lovely.
A lipstick is one small decision and it's an easy one. The harder one is waiting in the wardrobe on the other side of the room, and it turns up every morning of the year rather than once in December.
I've written a free guide to the five wardrobe types. You read the five, you find yours, and you see what your particular pattern has quietly been costing you.
About the Author
Magda Kazoli has spent twenty years in communication and six as a certified Image Consultant, working with women across 18 countries on their wardrobe and on the presence they carry into every room. She created the Visual Voice® System for the woman who senses that something has shifted. A new chapter. A career change. A quiet feeling that the woman in the mirror doesn't quite match the woman she's become. The wardrobe is full. Nothing feels right. That's the gap Magda works on.
Over 900 women across the UK, the US and Europe have gone through her Closet Confidence programme. Based in Athens, working internationally. Certified by House of Colour UK. Accredited member of FIPI, the Federation of Image Professionals International.
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