The empowering qualities of lipstick

My life has never been filled with designer trinkets.  I can't afford them, but in all honesty even if I had the money for them I'd be more inclined to buy artisan cheeses than artisan couture.  Not just because I love cheese more than life itself (even though that would be an impractical reality), but because I don't feel right in the sort of shops that sell designer merchandise.  One of the reasons for this is because everything's so bloody serious.   On the rare occasions I've ever been inside a designer boutique, I don't think I've ever heard anybody laugh.  Or talk, for that matter.  I feel as though I might be shushed if I were to do anything as impertinent as to ask the snooty shop assistant (I might be being unfair here, but they always look snooty, and anyway why would you want to work somewhere like that if you weren't in possession of a hint of snootiness) how much something is.  But that might be because, in my husband's words, "if you have to ask, you can't afford it".  I don't look as though I can afford it, and in these places how you look is all that matters.

But designer couture is supposed to be exclusive; that's why the models are so thin that if they turned to the side and stuck their tongues out, they'd be mistaken for zips.  If the models were a normal size they'd just be average, and true fashionistas don't really want to believe that average people are capable of buying and wearing high fashion.  The models saunter down the catwalks with the sort of pained looks that scream "I suffer for this kind of art!"  They're only aspirational to certain kinds of rich people (I'm tempted to say "those people with more money than sense", but I'm worried about sounding too much like my Nan).

Designer make-up, however, is dangerously aspirational on a "normal person" level.  Yes, the models have been airbrushed to within an inch of their lives; their eyelashes have been "filmed with inserts and enhanced in post-production", but there's still something about holding a Chanel lipstick and feeling that, just by putting it on, your life is about to improve immeasurably.

I was nineteen years old when I bought my first designer lipstick; a Christian Dior 'Dior Rouge'.  At the time I was working in a crappy Basildon-based cable telly call centre (this was before they all got moved to India, obviously...people must have decided at some point that they'd prefer their service providers to live half-way round the world rather than have an Essex accent, and who can blame them?).  But just purchasing the lipstick with its heavy gold-embossed casing imbued me with glamour; the kind of glamour that was going to carry me out of the confines of Basildon and into a heady world of champagne and poise (I was young, remember).

The friend I was shopping with at the time (and who had also bought a 'Dior Rouge') had the same idea.  After our splurge in the beauty halls we went for a drink and talked for ages about our ambitions and all the wonderful things we were going to end up doing.  I don't own many pieces of designer make-up, but when I do break with tradition and buy some, when I'm at the till point I'm always transported to that feeling on that afternoon on which I felt like I could do anything.

(The 'Dior Rouge', incidentally, wasn't very good.  It was a bit dry, and after about half an hour of wearing it all the colour faded from the middle leaving an ugly red outline reminiscent of Ronald McDonald.  But that heady empowering feeling was nice while it lasted).