PAINTED LADIES
How red lipstick has stood the test of time as the ultimate power pout
WHEN New York suffragettes stormed Fifth Avenue demanding the right to vote in 1915, they took care to dress as non-threateningly as possible: high-necked white dresses, dainty booties and jaunty hats. But they topped off their conservative outf its with something just the opposite: bold red lipstick.
In fact, a vibrantly painted pout was as much a part of a suffragette’s uniform as a silk sash declaring “Votes for Women.”
And, according to Rachel Felder, author of the new book “Red Lipstick: An Ode to a Beauty Icon,” it’s still a great tool for any woman seeking to seize power, command attention or shake up the status quo.
“You put on red lipstick and you wordlessly say, ‘Don’t mess with me,’ ” Felder tells The Post.
Fierce femmes have been deploying a red lip for millennia. According to makeup historian Susan Stewart, the ancient Egyptians were believed to have painted their lips with ocher, a clay pigment which produces a red-brown tint. Rulers like Cleopatra, meanwhile, asserted their wealth and divine status by using a more strident scarlet shade made from crushed insects.
It was the opposite in the Greek, Roman and especially Christian empires, which prized a more “natural,” demure look.
“They decried cosmetics for their erotic attractions and deceitful nature,” Kelly Olson, another historian, tells The Post.
Red lip color was seen as particularly threatening, associated with blood, lust and Eve’s apple.
“It was looked at as the devil’s lip color,” says Felder.
Of course, that has made the hue all the more alluring to a particular type of woman, one who didn’t have to — or refused to — answer to the demands of men.
Take Queen Elizabeth I, who was so obsessed with her red lip tint that when she died, there was
a thick layer of the stuff caked onto her mouth.
By the 1910s and ’20s, red lipstick was the cosmetic du jour among outspoken women, from the wild flappers of the Jazz Age — such as Clara Bow and Louise Brooks, who eschewed corsets, long hemlines and settling down — to the aforementioned suffragettes.
“Red lipstick is inherently powerful, because its color is so bold and simultaneously feminine,” says Felder, adding that it was the perfect accessory for the era of women’s suffrage. “It wasn’t just [about] empowerment, it was [about] female empowerment.”
During World War II, red lipstick was seen as a symbol of patriotic pluck in Allied Britain and the US.
“Hitler quite famously didn’t like red lipstick, so it became a political statement,” says Felder. It also spoke to women’s more empowered role in the workforce, symbolized in the figure of Rosie the Riveter, with her red bandana and matching lips.
Although Hollywood grand dame Elizabeth Taylor embraced beigey-nudes and creamy pinks during the ’60s and ’70s — such neutrals allowed for her stunning eyes to seriously stand out — by the ’80s, she returned to power-player red. According to Felder’s book, a makeup artist on the set of Taylor’s 1983 TV movie “Between Friends” was scolded for painting a scarlet pout on an extra. “Nobody but Elizabeth wears red,” the artist was told. So even when moody violet or tawny brown supplanted red in popularity from time to time, the shade has remained a perennial symbol of feminine power. “It’s why someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (inset) loves it so much,” says Felder. “You don’t get that from any other shade of lipstick.”