Ever cancelled a business lunch because you forgot your lipstick at home?

There is such a thing as Lipstick Day, yes. Here’s using it as an opportunity to delve into the psyche of women. Why is lip colour so important?

You can’t keep changing men, so you settle for changing your lipstick. Heather Locklear

If I had to teach someone just one thing about lip colour, it would be this: find a lipstick that looks good on your face when you are wearing absolutely no makeup. Bobbi Brown To me, lipstick is the best cosmetic that exists. Joan Collins

“Lipstick was an easy answer to boredom. It was the most exciting thing you could do in the shortest amount of time because, for a second, you got to convince yourself that you were the kind of gal who wears lipstick every day. You got to pout to yourself, and trick yourself that you were glamorous. Then in a second it was over, time to wipe it off and start again.”

Last Saturday was Lipstick Day. I know there’s a day for almost everything — and everyone (parents, teachers, friends, bosses etc) — under the sun, but I cannot help believing lipsticks deserve their spotlight. According to byrdie.com, “The average woman spends $15,000 on makeup in her lifetime — and of that amount, $1,780 goes toward lipstick.” Which is not really all that much, but talk about getting bang for the buck! (Then again, you have Guerlain’s KissKiss Gold and Diamonds Lipstick, a single piece of which costs $62,000!)

If you are feeling particularly deadbeat, yank out a lipstick from your handy handbag, and equipoise could be restored in a jiffy: a lipstick restores the colours right back into your life (at times, you can even scribble a note if you’re missing a pen), and it’s (generally) said a girl should never, ever be out and about sans a stick.

Is it any wonder that over 25 per cent women in the United States NEVER leave the house — even if it’s to do a spot of gardening in the front yard — with applying a shade of colour on their lips?

I have a friend who, upon discovering once that she’d forgotten to slip in a lipstick into her handbag, actually postponed a post-lunch meeting with an important client. “I’d finished lunch and had popped into the washroom to reapply lipstick before heading out for the meeting. To my horror, I realised the stick was missing! There was no way I could go into a meeting with partially-coloured lips, so I called this client and made up a story about something ‘urgent’ having come my way, so could he please postpone the meeting by half an hour? He obliged. I rushed to the nearest makeup store, and bought a lipstick, applied it, and then went for the meeting. There was no way I could have made it sans lipstick!”

The most intriguing spin on lipsticks is that the colours you choose — intuitively, and not because a woman has to “accessorise” her ensemble — reflect your personality. For instance, if you like light, nude shades, it means you’re warm, caring and dependable; whereas, if you like reds and more dramatic shades, it means you’re creative, daring and ambitious (the internet has a story on how Elizabeth Taylor, always a stickler for red lipstick would, allegedly, demand no other woman wear red on the sets).

While the first recorded use was around 1880, lipsticks probably had their first reference point in the time of Cleopatra; she apparently made a ‘homemade’ red lip stain made from “crushed Carmine beetles and ants” (what did I tell you about red-lipped ladies being daring and ambitious?). Long before the invention of the lipstick, women (and some men) systematically coloured their lips (the business opportunity was waiting to be pounced on).