Red, She Said

Giving red lipstick another try...

Hello, Gorgeous!

If I had to describe my go-to lip color it would be a plum/mauve mashup with (lots of) gloss on demand. It’s flattering, it matches pretty much anything, and it’s easy to manage. But I wasn’t always this practical. Long before Taylor Swift even knew what an era was, I committed to my red era.

My red era

From about the time that I hit my 19th birthday —and for more than the decade or so that followed—my signature lip color was red. Bold, stark, in your face scarlet, vermillion or ruby, at all times and in all ways. But trends change. Times change. People change. And so I veered away from my bold pop of color to variations of something safer and consistently flattering.

Why I started avoiding red

Despite my tendencies toward relentless positivity, like most women with my 40th birthday well in the rearview mirror, I feel the pressures of society to stay forever young. And so I worried that wearing red lipstick, might age me more. Would it leak into the fine lines near my mou…