One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times – Chapter 70

#70 – “Always put on lipstick so you won’t look so washed out.”
(Photo is of The Book Goddesses, clockwise, Debbie Kern, Loralee Martin, Me, Cathy Crabtree, Cathy Weaver, Debbie Tate and Sandra Martin.)
Anyone who knows me knows that I take this one of one hundred things very seriously. You won’t catch me without lipstick very often. It’s sort of a defining characteristic: my trademark. When I told an old boyfriend one time that I bet the first thing that attracted him to me was my boobs, his reply was, “Actually, they were the second and third things. The first was your lips.”

Mom was never without lipstick either, although her choice of color was decidedly more conservative then mine. I lean towards the “Look at Me” reds and “I’m A Hot Bitch” orange. I think there are some self-esteem issues there, but I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about lipstick.

I loooove lipstick! I’m the Imelda Marcos of lipstick. I just did a quick and dirty count to see how many tubes of lipstick I had in my makeup drawer, purse and car, and was rather horrified to discover there were only 32! Of course I did do a major purge a couple of weeks ago, taking cast offs to Goodwill.

Aside from the emotional investment, my financial investment in lipstick is also substantial. I figure I buy 2-3 tubes of CoverGirl Outlast All Day Lipcolor (my fave) per month, and at $10 a pop that’s about $360 a year on lipstick. However, I used to wear Chanel Rouge Hydrabase Crème Lipstick, went through 2-3 tubes per month, and those cost $30 a tube or $1,000 per year. Just for giggles, lets calculate a lifetime investment: $50,000! Holy Gloss, that’s just obscene! But then, I got to be me. Click on Read More Below...

Of course being a researcher, I would find a survey to justify my obsession. In the “Lipstick Diaries” survey commissioned by L’Oreal Paris and conducted online by Harris Interactive, of the nearly 2,300 men and women responding to a survey between March 25 and 29, “70% of men associate women in red lipstick with positive sentiments like being sexy, confident and successful while only 18% think it appears promiscuous.”

And then there’s the SueAnn Wade-Crouse survey conducted in cars, bars, and bedrooms of nearly…well, lets just say “a good sampling” of men between 1963 and 2011 (OK, just one guy for the last 20 years), and 100% of them liked it!

I love what my friend Carol says when I need to apply more lipstick. She will put out her hands as if feeling around the room and say, “I know you’re there SueAnn, but I can’t see you!”

So mom was right, “Always put on lipstick so you won’t look so washed out.”