German actress Barbara Sukowa on the set of the film “Lola, une femme allemande†directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. (Photo by Rialto Film/Trio Film/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images)
For a long time, lip unguent didn’t come on a stick. It wasn’t served up in smooth columns of ruddy, angle-cut perfection and didn’t benefit from a bullet-like compact casing and micro-engineered, swivel-action system that delivered lushness to mouth, to order, in evenly intense quantities.
Five thousand years ago, things were more make-do and basic – the men and women of Mesopotamia crushed gemstones to smear onto their faces, while Egyptians ground cochineal insects to make carmine colour for the lips.
During the Bronze Age, women from ancient Harappan Civilisations in Southern Asia used pieces of ochre with bevelled ends as early experiments with lip decoration. As far back as the second and third centuries, Sanskrit texts report Hindus preferring to colour lips with red lac resin and beeswax, while flamboyant types from the Tang Dynasty used scented oils for extra enticement.
Long associated with seduction, emancipation and sensuality, lipstick gained in popularity in the 1500s when it was boldly adopted by Queen Elizabeth I. However, the lead and vermillion concoctions acquired a reputation as the uncouth warpaint of actors and prostitutes (in the 1500s a law was passed ‘declaring the use of make-up to deceive an Englishman into marriage punishable as witchcraft’). But gradual social acceptance, better formulations (beeswax, castor oil, pigment and silica) and a Jazz Age rebrand caused a century-long boom. Silent-movie star Louise Brooks helped by providing big-screen endorsements.
But who actually invented the game-changing rouge à lèvres twist-up case? The first lippy actually on a stick?
The French claim that the Parisian beauty house Guerlain got there as far back as 1870 – a maison employee being inspired by the screw mechanism seen on a candlestick. Picky historians have a different view, citing the hand of innovative jewellers in the 1920s who repurposed used cartridge shells from World War One, fashioning make-up holders which were added to the purses and chatelaines of Clara Bow types.
Over in the US, circa 1915, powder-puff magnate Maurice Levy sold lipstick in a small metal canister called the ‘Levy Tube’, which deployed a lever to raise the lipstick's bullet, Americans also maintaining that the first swivel tube was patented in Nashville, Tennessee, by James Bruce Mason Jr. in the 1920s... or was it the Scovill Manufacturing Company’s metal-cased swivel tube patented in 1923? A case must also be made for inventor William Kendall whose ‘neat, ornamental and serviceable lip stick holder’ including ‘a lipstick receiving follower’ was registered in January 1917.
Toutefois, the Maison Guerlain prevailed – making lipstick for the European masses and going on to lip-service the rest of the world. Other French fashion and cosmetics houses would follow.
One hundred years later, variants such as Chanel Rouge Coco and Rouge Dior 999 shift multimillion units annually. Back in 2023 the global lipstick market was valued at $9.5 billion. It is projected to reach $15.6 billion by 2033.
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