As I child of the '90s, I spent a solid part of my youth sporting a mood ring. There were the inferior 25-cent types that came out of dispensers at the grocery store. I collected those by the dozens. Then, there were the fancier ones in cool shapes that could be bought at funky bead shops or Claire’s. Those were the real prize. But regardless of their quality or provenance, mine always remained a cold sapphire hue. According to all the charts, blue meant “happy, calm, or peaceful.” Blue meant b oring. I longed for a fiery orange or at least a little green. Of course, it was only later that I learned that the colors were dependent on body temperature and, to absolutely nobody’s great shock except my own, the top of your finger doesn’t make major temperature swings throughout the day. After that, it didn’t take long for me to give up my mood rings and move on to other jewelry fads. (Tattoo chokers anyone?)
It should come as no surprise that the moment I heard about Dior’s Dior Addict Lip Glow Color Reviver Balm my nostalgia got the best of me, and I went out and bought some. A little more grown up than a mood ring, Lip Glow supposedly reacts to the “unique chemistry” of the wearer’s lips to create the perfect custom hue. It won't change if you get hot-tempered, but maybe that's a good thing. Then there's Smashbox’s O-Gloss Intuitive Lip Gloss With Goji Berry-C Complex and Sephora Collection Color Reveal Lip Balm, making similar claims about a custom color created by the lipstick’s reaction to the individual body’s pH levels. It was quickly turning into a “gotta catch 'em all' scenario.
The idea of color-changing lip color isn’t new by any stretch. Old-school brand Tangee has a similar product that dates back to the 1920s, and Avon has some from the '70s (when the color-changing lipsticks really took off). Then there’s a hard-to-find Hare Magic Moroccan Color Changing Lipstick that some people swear by and order in bulk via eBay.
Perhaps the most obvious statement to make about these is that results may vary. On the high end (Dior, Sephora) they mainly come in an innocuous shade of light pink that deepens on contact.(Physicians Formula pH Matchmaker pH Powered Lip Gloss and NYX Mood Lip Gloss are the drugstore dupes.) Then there's MoodMatcher which comes in a seriously freaky shades of lime green and acid yellow. Most exotic are the Hare Magic Moroccan ones. I tried the most ubiquitous one in a bright green shade first and was shocked when it turned a vibrant shade of berry pink upon contact with my lips—hello, cognitive dissonance. I was even more surprised when I tried to wipe it off and found the color stubbornly attached to my mouth. Points for long-lasting wear, at the very least. When I eventually got the color off (almost 24 hours and a few lip scrubs later), I tried out the Dior, which slid on in an almost-imperceptible, clear-rose shade but quickly turned a brighter shade of pink. It took a few minutes, but the end result was almost exactly the same as the drugstore stuff.
In the end, all the lip colors turned a fairly uniform shade of berry. Of course those that were already dyed a deep shade of pink or red went on more cherry-hued than the clearer (or yellower) ones, but I have to admit that the final results were all basically the same. This was starting to feel like mood ring déjà vu.
Turns out, it’s all due to an ingredient called Red 27. A dye the FDA lists as safe for use in drugs and cosmetics (but not those that will be used close to the eyes…), its specific formulation allows it to be colorless when dissolved in a waterless base (i.e. a waxy lipstick). Once exposed to moisture, it turns a bright pinkish-red. So, yes, it is technically reacting to your individual skin in that your skin has a higher pH than the lipstick tube and also has water in it, but other than that, things aren’t much more personalized. The only real difference lays in your skin tone. It will obviously look different on someone with dark skin than it does on someone with a pale complexion. That’s not chemistry; that’s just nature.
Because I really wanted to believe in the magic of the lipstick, I even swiped a few sticks across a dry paper towel. Then, I dripped a bit of water onto them. Sure enough, they turned the same bright pink that I had seen on my lips. Bummer. But, while their enchantment may have faded for me, I will say this for the latest addition to my makeup bag: take a lime green lipstick out in any bathroom, and you are guaranteed to make some fast friends.
—Victoria Lewis
Photographed by Tom Newton.
After lower sales over the last few years because of pandemic masking, lipstick is this summer’s comeback kid. But lipstick usage has always been cyclical, explains legal scholar Sarah E. Schaffer. It’s a cycle that includes much more than beauty: gender, class, health, and religion have played a role in its popularity from the very beginning.
Lipstick hasn’t always been safe, though as Schaffer notes, “Historically, one was relatively less likely to die from lipstick than from most other cosmetics products.” The first known lipstick was created somewhere around 3500 BCE and was worn by Queen Schub-ad of ancient Ur. The lip tint contained a mix of “white lead and crushed red rocks” and became so popular that people would be buried with cockleshells full of it. In Egypt, all genders used makeup as part of a daily routine, the vibrant color coming from red ochre, “either applied alone or mixed with resin or gum for more lasting finish.” Other popular colors included orange, magenta, and blue-black, and as in Ur, those with the means were buried with at least two pots of lip color.
Prostitutes “could be punished for improperly posing as ladies” if they appeared in public without their lip paint and other makeup.
The vibe was decidedly different in ancient Greece. A backlash against “rampant reliance on lipstick’s artificial beauty” shifted its social status: in the Greek empire, lip paint was mainly worn by sex workers. Red was still in vogue, achieved by dyes and wine, as well as “extraordinary ingredients as sheep sweat, human saliva and crocodile excrement.” The status shift also led to the first regulations for the cosmetic, but not for the safety reasons you would think, given the ingredients. Because of lip paint’s “potential deception of men and the undermining of class divides,” its use led to new laws; prostitutes “could be punished for improperly posing as ladies” if they appeared in public without their lip paint and other makeup.
The rise of the Roman empire saw lipstick, once again, becoming chic. Men used it to indicate their social standing, and wealthy women used it for fashion. However, beauty and status came at a price. The ingredients—ochre, iron ore, and fucus plants—“infused lip paint with a potentially deadly poison.”
Lipstick usage declined during Western Europe’s Early Middle Ages (roughly 500–1000 CE) as there was a “gradual but distinct shift in favor of a rather plainer, and possibly slightly less washed existence.” By the High Middle Ages (1000–1300s CE), religion took lipstick off the must-have list. In England, Schaffer explains, women who wore make-up were understood to have entered into a pact with the devil, “because such alteration of her given face challenged God and his workmanship.”
Fast forward to the 1700s, when England imposed even harsher restrictions on make-up: Parliament passed legislation that made anything that altered a woman’s appearance—wigs, false teeth, and high heeled shoes, among them—grounds for having her marriage annulled or being tried for witchcraft. As Schaffer writes, this is another law that protected men, but it had a surprising outcome for women. Because of it, fewer women bought lipstick, which at the time often contained mercury-laden vermilion. The restriction likely saved many of women from poisoning.
Prohibition of lipstick also meant that it became a dirty little secret or a look women tried to achieve through clandestine means. In the Victorian era, thanks to the Queen’s public declaration that makeup was “impolite,” women resorted to lip biting, rubbing red ribbons on their lips, and trading recipes for lipstick “with their friends in underground lip rouge societies.” For women of privilege, trips to Paris, where they could buy Guerlain’s lip pomade of grapefruit, butter, and wax, were a sneaky but suitable solution.
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In twentieth-century America, suffragettes used lipstick “as an emblem of women’s emancipation.” Color began showing up on the lips of more and more women. But safety was still an issue. As Schaffer describes, the “common American recipe of crushed insects, beeswax and olive oil produced lipstick with an unfortunate tendency to turn rancid several hours after application.” It wasn’t until 1938, when the United States passed the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, that safety standards were introduced; no more could cosmetics include “poisonous” or “deleterious” substances. In the following decades, additional laws, particularly at the state level, would introduce even tighter safety regulations for cosmetics.
Lipstick is a surprisingly political product. From the early uses in ancient societies, to rebellious years of the 1970s when it was “adopted by both sexes of the punk-rock music and cultural movement to express sex, violence and general nonconformity,” to current debates over the use of animal testing to ensure consumer safety, it’s now a common if still sometimes controversial sight. But, as Schaffer cautions, lipstick’s pattern of going “from the heights of popularity to the depths of social unacceptability make[s] it much more likely than most people probably imagine for lipstick to go severely out of fashion.”
Editor’s Note: This article was updated to fix broken link tag.
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