Lipstick has a vast history, larded with details so strange they don't seem real. Take the old color names, for instance. Those cataloged during the English Renaissance include Beggar's Grey, Horseflesh, The Devil in the Head, Pease-Porridge, Ape's Laugh, Smoked Ox, Merry Widow, Hair, Resurrection, Dying Monkey, and Ham Color, according to Jessica Pallingston in the book Lipstick—and "when you died, your lips turned Milk and Water (bluish white)."

Ingredients included fish scales, turpentine, castor oil, sheep caul, and crushed beetles, but women just as often made up their own techniques. They bit their lips to deepen the color, painted them in brandy, caked them with crumbs of cut-up red ribbons, or pressed them into pink crepe paper to acquire its tinted residue. Ancient lipstick-application tools included everything from wet sticks to rabbits' feet (still attached to the body, let's hope). And in Inventing Beauty, Teresa Riordan describes the many dispenser designs surging the US Patent Office in the 1920s and '30s: One had a retracting-slat cover "like a rolltop desk," one bloomed intricately open with tulip-shaped flanges, and another resembled "a piece of toast popping out of a toaster."

Women wear lipstick to enhance their beauty, of course. Though when it's stripped of its erotic qualities, the same product abruptly suggests madness. In The Pink Palace, Sandra Lee Stuart describes the glamorous squalor maids regularly encountered in Elizabeth Taylor's Beverly Hills hotel room, with clothes, makeup brushes, liquor bottles, jars of pills, and diamond jewelry "flung higgledy-piggledy." Lipstick smeared the towels, of course, yet at times the smudges ended up on the ceiling, and no one could understand why the fuck, or how.

Years earlier, and in a different hotel, merciless Revlon founder Charles Revson was so obsessed by his singular focus, he "never went to bed without putting lipstick on his lips and nail polish on his nails," said colleague Jack Price in Teresa's book. "He would leave a call with the desk to wake him at two and at four and at six to see how it was wearing."

And in present times, at Barneys downtown, a cosmetics salesperson wishing to remain anonymous describes an outwardly normal "middle-aged housewife-type woman in yoga pants" who comes in once or twice a week and violates the counter samples. "It's always the same lipstick, a coral red: Tulipe by Chantecaille. She rubs it into her hands and then all over her face. It's a bizarre ritual, I don't know what it means, and once she's done, half the tube is gone."

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