Red lipstick: the genital echo-o-o

Pervette. Fetish. Velvet Teddy. Wine With Everything Frost. Apricot Fantasy. Raisin Rage. These aren’t the senseless ramblings of a make-up marketing team grasping at straws* – they’re just a small selection of the lipstick shades that grace makeup counters in our malls, and our faces on Saturday night. A host of studies have shown that women with red lipstick get more tips, are approached more frequently in a bar  and just look downright more attractive. But why is red lipstick so sexay?

Kirshenbaum (2011) suggests it started like many good stories: with a fight for survival. Picture our ancestors, wandering through the forest trying not to die of starvation. In this environment ‘seeing red’ meant spotting the ripest fruits and berries, which gave a key advantage to help them not die long enough to pass on these colour-detecting genes to their children. Over time, red became associated with food rewards, a fact that the marketing teams at McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, KFC, etc. etc. etc. fruitfully exploit.

Once the ‘red=reward’ association had been established, it became appropriated by another bodily desire: sex. Comparative evolutionary research suggests the evolution of colour vision in primates prompted changes in the coloring of certain body parts. So when “our ancestors developed the ability to detect red [for food], it became emphasized on their bodies and particularly in the labial region, serving to indicate a female’s peak period of fertility, called estrus” (Kirshenbaum, 2011). These areas of ‘sexual skin’ swell up and turn bright red or pink during ovulation. Woods, a primate scientists at Duke University, reckons “female bonobos look like they are carrying their own bright red bean bag attached to their bottoms to sit down on when they get tired”. Glad humans dodged that one.

Today’s woman has a ‘hidden estrus’ – phew – meaning that we don’t have a big, red rump to bring all the boys to the yard. But what do we have instead? According to Desmond Morris, a British zoologist, it’s all in the lips: a woman’s facial lips have become a ‘genital echo’ which “resemble the female labia in their texture, thickness, and colour” (Kirshenbaum, 2011). Together with our genitals, they swell and redden when we’re sexually stimulated. Red lips also signpost fertility, as the rise in estrogen that occurs when a woman is ovulating enhances blood flow near the skin’s surface, which makes for redder lips. This means that red lips are a sign that a woman is both sexually aroused and that she’s babies-a-go-go.

So when you’re putting on your red lippy, or eyeing off someone who has, remember you’re participating in a genital advertising campaign that has been operating for thousands of years. Today, thanks to the range of lipsticks available, the modern girl can have a few different shades of vagina in her purse: “these lipstick manufacturers did not create an enhanced mouth; they created a pair of super labia” (Morris, 2011). Which explains why clowns, with their giant, smudgey, rounded genital echoes, are so particularly creepy.

*Yes they are.