What price the perfect lipstick?

It seems you can put a price on a perfect berry lip…

DO YOU REMEMBER when Tom Ford smashed the glass ceiling for lipstick prices back in 2010? Probably not. I do, because the PR schlepped out to the East End offices where I then worked and laid out each of the prototypes in all their pristine, expensively packaged glory on our sad, skanky desks while we looked on with grudging respect.

Back then, the white and gold casings were considered almost avantgarde in their retro glamour. Just brushing your fingers against those cold, gleaming obelisks made you feel like Bette Davis. But £36? For a lipstick? Our fingers recoiled as if they’d been electrocuted almost before the numbers were out of the PR’S mouth (who knew fingers were financially responsible?).

We didn’t mind using the three samples she left behind, though. And we did note that plenty of women would be willing to pay £36, because the texture, pigments and staying power were pretty damn good and because, really, £36 is loose change compared to the astronomical amounts we blitz on clothes.

Here one arrives at the central quandary of Das Kapital – the one about how the first traders decided on the first price ever paid for anything. Put another way: how large a premium could or should one pay for something that although not expensive to make, is very, very good?

I ask because recently Pat Mcgrath, the make-up supremo, gave me a triumvirate (what is it with threes?) of her Pat Mcgrath Labs lipsticks to try. The nude made me look like a corpse, although Pat valiantly said I looked fabulous, darling. The other two – Sorry Not Sorry (a pinky berry) and Beautiful Creature (a brownish berry) actually did look fabulous. I mean, sorry Tom, but I think Pat wins. For one, the colours (not the corpse one, obviously) manage to be the strongest yet most flattering berry shades around. Two, their longevity. It’s long. Three, their texture. I’ve not come across anything quite like them: creamy but not smudgy, matt but not drying. I could apply them in the dark, in a hurricane wearing gloves and somehow there’d be no bleeding or teeth-marking.

Just one tiny drawback. They’re not available here yet, so prices (on ebay) fluctuate between £52 and £108 (truly). I think we all know what Marx would have to say about this, so alongside the perfect £52 berry lipstick, I offer you some almost perfect alternatives.