I Hate Lipstick!!

I am not a girly-girl. When all the little girls were playing dress-up and fiddling with their mothers’ make-up, I was outside throwing dirt clods and playing Army. I paid no attention to how my mother put on her make-up or how she wiggled into that girdle. I wasn’t interested. Until…I noticed the boys. Then I did a quick lesson in dressing and making up my face. Except for that darn lipstick. I never could get the hang of it and I didn’t like the cloying way it felt. Besides, boys that wanted to kiss me didn’t like having it smeared all over their lips. Why bother?

I have always watched and admired those women who could whip out a tube of lipstick, dash it across their lips and look marvelous. I, on the other hand, have always laboriously applied it to my lips while firmly planted in front of a mirror in the bathroom. Until the other day…

Lipstick is different these days. I decided to try that new lip stain that every cosmetic company is touting. I thought the stuff would suit me. It promised to give me some color that would last all day. Great! I wouldn’t have to bother with finding a mirror and smearing on some color every few minutes!

Well…it never occurred to me that if it stains your lips, the skin around your mouth is also going to be susceptible. I plopped the unused tube into my purse and climbed into the car. We were meeting some people for dinner and my husband was driving. As usual, I was late getting dressed so I figured I put the lip stain on while in the car, just like I normally did with REGULAR lipstick. Close to our destination I fumbled with the plastic safety covering on the tube. It had those little perforations which were supposed to make it easy to open. Yeah, right. I had to practically chew the covering off. Spitting out tiny fragments of plastic, I flipped down the visor mirror, tube of lip stain in hand. Now, travelling at seventy miles an hour, I should have considered the inherent problems of using a long wand of pink stuff that was permanent. Taking aim at my bottom lip, I applied it with ease. Done. Now for the upper lip…Ooops! Hit a pothole! The wand slipped and now I had a smear of luscious pink across the skin above my lip. I grabbed a tissue and rubbed furiously. Still there. I kept rubbing but the stuff wasn’t coming off. I looked like the Joker on Batman. I couldn’t get it off with a moist towelette. Nothing could get it off!!! Our destination was getting closer and I would not be able to face people looking like a clown!

My husband, trying not to laugh, offered his glasses lens cleaner which contained alcohol. Desperate, I tried it. The color faded a bit but I could still see it. Maybe no one would notice. Right. All evening I saw people staring intently at my upper lip. Guess they wondered why I looked like I had been outside all day in the wind, chapping my skin. No one said anything and I was grateful to slink out. At home, acetone was the only thing that got rid of it completely. Now the skin above my lip just looked like it had been rubbed raw instead of luscious pink.

The lip stain is some dangerous stuff. Like a loaded gun, you have to be aware of its inherent danger – It remains where you put it. I now have a healthy respect for lip stain. It’s good and it works if you apply it correctly and not while travelling at seventy miles an hour.



Have you ever had an experience like this? Say, walking around with a piece of toilet paper stuck to your shoe? Or a black smudge of mascara across your eyelid when you thought you really looked good? Let me in on those embarrassing moments.