Lipstick Warfare

From ancient queens to TikTok feens—lipstick has always been warpaint. #LIPSTICKGATE

My mom always told me: never leave the house without a little lipstick.

“Emilie Catherine Shreder Hagen,” she said during a recent visit, “could you do me a favor and at least put on some lipstick if you’re going to leave the house looking like that?”

I was wearing the same purple velour jumpsuit I’d been living in for days, my hair twisted into a messy bun, no makeup, running a quick errand to the post office. I didn’t understand why I needed to glam up for USPS, but she worried one of her friends might see me and wonder, “What happened to Emilie? She used to be such a pretty girl.”

If I actually wanted to impress the locals of Attica, NY—a federal prison town with more cows than people—I’d take a proper shower and actually sit down and do my makeup. But to my mother, that was unnecessary.

“Lipstick is all a woman needs,” she said.

It suddenly made sense why I was voted “Most Concerned About Looks” senior year of high school. A legacy title, passed down like a family heirloom. My mother and grandmother both won the same award.

Back in my mother’s heyday, lipstick was the holy grail of glamour. American women huddled in living rooms, sipping Giner ale out of styrofoam cups while their local Mary Kay rep unzipped a suitcase of ruby red lipstick samples—each one promising a touch of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. Sure, Marilyn had the curves and the sexy white halter dress, but it was her red lips that sealed the post-WWII fantasy, a time when the government pushed lipstick to women as a patriotic duty. A fresh coat of red, they said, could boost the nation’s morale!

For many years—especially during Mary Kay’s pink Cadillac heyday, back before the world woke up to it being an MLM cult—all a sales rep needed was a solid lipstick pitch. And all a girl needed was a great lipstick that fit in her purse. One coat, and she was ready to face the world. Two coats, and she was ready to burn it down.

Today, beauty is more complicated. Influencers and AI filters have raised the bar to impossible new heights. Now, we’re told we need contour, highlighter, brow gel, blurring powder, pore minimizer, magnetic lashes—15+ products just to achieve the “clean girl” look, wearing makeup that makes us look like we’re wearing no makeup at all. A look that costs $300 and two hours of our morning.

They call it “effortless.”

They meant “exhausting.”

We’re not sold lipstick anymore—we’re sold lips.
Lip flips. Lip filler. Fill this. Inject that. A billion-dollar beauty industry built on erasing asymmetry and plumping us into a population of human blowfish- smooth, swollen and similar.

And at one point, no one sold that dream harder than Kylie Jenner.

Kylie pulled off one of the most iconic lies in modern beauty culture when she convinced the world her lips went from barely-there to Bratz doll bimbo overnight, all thanks to a $29 lip kit. She made us believe her lips ballooned into cartoonish proportions using nothing more than a pencil and matte stain.

The lie was absurd—but I bought it anyway. Six kits, mid-pandemic. Not because I believed her, but because a small part of me wondered: what if this really works? I’d never used lip liner before, and for a moment, my lips did look fuller. But the formula dried them out, left them cracked, and by 2022, I’d tossed all six tubes.

Now the only time I see the pink boxes is when I’m traveling—stuffed tightly in airport vending machines, glowing in Terminal B like relics of yet another fair-weather Kardashian business venture. And for some reason, they’re always suspiciously fully stocked.

These days, I’ve mostly given up on vanity. Self-care has taken a back seat while I’ve thrown my energy into more mentally indulgent tasks—sacrificing beauty sleep to deliver salacious deep dives on subjects best unraveled during the witching hours.

While I was in New York, vanity became inescapable again. Everyone suddenly had a stake in my face. Not just my mother, but Instagram followers, TikTok trolls, and my friend’s date—a Long Island MedSpa doctor who asked if I’d ever considered a lip flip or botox to “fix” the way I speak.

I told him I hadn’t.

He then turned to his date—a stunning Portuguese girl with arguably the fullest natural lips of anyone I know—and said even she could use a little lip filler.

She stared at him.
“I appreciate asymmetry.”
“I do too,” he pretended.
“Prove it,” she fired back.

The Knicks were in overtime, and somehow this diehard fan was more fixated on our perceived flaws than the final minute of the game. Our natural faces gave him the ick. At least that’s what his frozen forehead was emoting.

There was no second date.

At the time, I was still settling into my new East Coast life. I’d flown to New York to cover the eight-week Sean “Diddy” Combs trial, chasing down what I suspected was a deep state cover-up—not auditioning for Wilhelmina. But just a few days in, it hit me: in journalism, looks still matter. After showing up to court in lipstick shades far too loud for my skin tone, the internet sent a unanimous message—“Fix your lipstick, girl.” The fire-engine reds I’d swiped on only made it more obvious that I talk out of the side of my mouth like Drew Barrymore.

I borrowed a sticky lip gloss from a friend—“Daikon,” a soft pink with a purple undertone by BITE—and something shifted. The moment I put it on, my DMs lit up—"That’s your color, girl.”

I brought the tube to Sephora in Williamsburg, hoping to buy it myself only for the makeup rep to tell me the news: discontinued. For twenty minutes, we wandered through the store swatching anything remotely close. NARS, Urban Decay, Fenty, Makeup Forever—none delivered. All of the popular beauty brands had abandoned bubblegum pink. Everything was warm-toned, muted, nude—the Kardashians’ legacy of taupe and terracotta, everywhere. I couldn’t believe it. The Skims aesthetic had somehow infiltrated the shelves of Sephora.

“Try Lip Lab,” he said, suddenly remembering that the same brand behind the discontinued lipstick I was chasing—BITE Beauty—had opened a custom color studio just around the corner.

Turns out, it was fate. Lip Lab was open and taking walk-in appointments. I wandered in and was greeted by a woman with seafoam green hair and a septum piercing that sparkled under the fluorescent lights. She told me that the color I was looking for was indeed discontinued, but was confident she could create the same shade from scratch. For the next half hour, I perched on a sleek stool and watched her swirl pigments around on a laminated piece of paper.

Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians crushed gemstones to tint their lips. Today, we outsource the magic to Lip Lab technicians in trendy uniforms.

In the back room, a bridal party was customizing lipsticks together before a wedding. I wasn’t surprised. What bride doesn’t want a custom shade for her girls? But I did wonder—was she also the kind of bride who makes everyone wear the same dusty rose dress that only flatters 1 out of 6 complexions?

The first shade she conjured up scared me. It was a ghastly greyish-purple—closer to bruised fruit than blooming rose. But three rounds later, voilà—she nailed it.

It rang up at $65.

A steep price for a single lipstick—but it was the exact shade I’d been chasing, now in a sleek tube engraved with my name: EMILIE.

I don’t know who I thought I was in that moment, dropping nearly seventy bucks on a single lipstick, but maybe I was just channeling my inner Cleopatra—who famously concocted her own lip color from crushed carmine beetles and ants. In Ancient Egypt, lip paint wasn’t vanity—it was power. A symbol of seduction, status, even divinity.

Lipstick has always been more than makeup. It’s a message. Cleopatra knew it. My mother knew it. And after watching women bond over $65 lipsticks on a rainy Saturday in Brooklyn, I remembered it, too.

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Lipstick Politicized

Even though most think of lipstick as just a cosmetic—it’s long been something deeper. A symbol of power. A tool of rebellion. A flash of defiance. For centuries, red lips have unsettled the establishment. Some cultures and religions have even called it demonic, a deceitful lure meant to tempt and corrupt.

I remembered a conversation I had in Austin a few years back with a Mormon friend, who explained how his church viewed makeup—particularly blush and lipstick—as tools of seduction. Blush, he said, was meant to mimic the flush of arousal; lipstick, an artificial signal of desire. I carried on with my smokey eye anyways.

During the Middle Ages, lipstick vanished. The Church had deemed it sinful—an act of vanity, deception, even witchcraft. Women who wore it risked being labeled seductresses or “tools of the devil.” And yet, behind palace doors and inside velvet-draped boudoirs, the wealthy still swiped their lips in secret with shades of forbidden crimson. Queen Elizabeth I famously brought lipstick back into fashion during her 16th century reign, believing it held healing powers; legend says she died with her lips painted red. But by the Victorian era, it was taboo again—only worn by actresses and prostitutes.

During the Suffragette movement, women campaigning for voting rights wore red lipstick as a defiant symbol against the men trying to silence their voices.

“This was seen as the mark of the independent, emancipated woman, which at the time was thought to be quite scandalous,” Gabriela Hernandez, cosmetics historian and founder of Bésame Cosmetics, told Teen Vogue in 2020.

After Trump won the election, Gen Z launched “The Red Lipstick Movement”—a TikTok-era protest where teens filmed themselves swiping on crimson lips in defiance of MAGA. One guy even pledged to wear red lipstick daily “until we get a new president.” (He didn’t last long.)

Today, some MAHA moms reject lipstick entirely—avoiding it over chemical concerns and championing “clean beauty” or no makeup at all. It’s a modern echo of the 1970s, when women ditched their compacts and flipped off glossy magazine ideals, embracing bare faces as political rebellion.

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When I was at my parents’ house in Attica, I found out the local Rite Aid was going out of business and makeup was 70% off. I popped in to see what was left and shockingly, their lipstick section had all the colors I was looking for. I walked out with an armful of new pinkish-purple shades.

The “you’re not ugly, you’re just poor” phrase died for me that day. I looked pretty good— for just $4.

Did I go overboard buying a bunch of $4 shades? Probably. But then I thought of my cousin—the one with a 40-year-old lipstick collection and a motto she’s lived by since 1979 prom night: you can never have too many lipsticks.

Maybe that was true once. But does it still hold up in 2025? When TikTok makeup influencers give glossy tours of their “beauty rooms”—miniature Ultas packed with 500 square feet of PR packages, ring lights and drawers filled with 1,000s of untouched products?

Take Mikayla Nogueira—arguably the most influential beauty creator online right now, with 16.8 million followers and counting. While I was blowing my stimulus check on Kylie lip kits during the pandemic, she was filming makeup tutorials in her childhood bedroom after long shifts at Ulta. Six months later, she had amassed nearly 2 million followers— enough to quit Ulta.

Today, she owns her own makeup line and makes GRWM videos from the comfort of her new $4.35 million mansion in Massachusetts with a beauty room bigger than most Manhattan apartments.

The glow-up was real. So was the backlash.

As her TikToks rack up millions of views, her Reddit snark thread swells just as fast—37,000 self-proclaimed “Massholes” dissecting her every move. They criticize everything from her excessive use of filters to her endless PR hauls to the infamous Lashgate scandal, when she was allegedly caught wearing falsies in a mascara ad.

But in beauty, controversy sells. Ask Jeffree Star. Ask James Charles. Playing it safe doesn’t build empires.

By the end of the trial, I started showing up to court camera ready, holding my own with my drugstore makeup collection next to the anchors, the network crews, the suited-up parade of legacy media who have their own makeup artists. I was done playing small. If I flew myself across the country to cover one of the biggest trials of the year, the least I could do was sharpen my lip liner.

My followers noticed my gradual glow up. They started DMing me asking me to link all my new lipsticks, claiming that they’re also struggling to find pink and purple shades in stores.

Turns out, we’re all sick of beige. We’re tired of brown. Bored with peach. We’re craving 80s and 90s colors again.

Somehow the Kardashians, with the help of Ye, convinced us that color isn’t cool anymore. But I would argue that Ye was a lot cooler when he was rocking pink polos.

So, by popular demand— the moment you’ve all been waiting for: #LIPSTICKGATE LINKS!

Unlike the White House, I have fulfilled my promise of releasing “the list,” my lipstick list.

Linked below are all of my Diddy trial lipsticks and makeup favorites.

If we’re lucky, even the White House administration is reading this Substack.

If anyone needs a makeover right now—it’s the U.S. government. Last week’s #BinderGate stunt wasn’t just tone-deaf, it was full-blown clown glam. Greasy foundation. Crooked lashes. Cheap gloss smeared over a festering black eye of corruption. No amount of concealer can hide a coverup this ugly. At this point, red lipstick isn’t enough to save face. Someone hand Pam Bondi some makeup wipes and a mirror. It’s time they see what the rest of us are looking at.

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Lipstick Links

1. Ilia: Balmy Tint Hydrating Lip Balm in Shade “Lady”

Your every day red lip! Lots of pigment and its clean beauty!

2. L’Oreal Colour Riche Original Satin Lipstick in Shade “Tickled Pink”

A soft, bubblegum pink that works as a nude

3. ONE/SIZE by Patrick Starr Lip Snatcher Waterproof Precision Lip Liner in Shade “Make it Known”

Incredible lip liner that I wear alone with a gloss on top, or with any of my lighter pink lipstick shades

4. CoverGirl Clean Fresh Yummy Lip Gloss in Shade “Laugh-vender”

   A perfect, affordable lip gloss with a tint of purple

   

5. Dior Lip Glow Oil Hydrating High-Shine Gloss in Shade “Berry”

   A pigmented gloss with a tint of pinkish-purple. My fanciest aka most expensive lip gloss but has lasted me 2 years. A high-quailty shine on the lips

6. Revlon ColorStay Satin Ink Liquid Lipstick, in Shade “011 Own It”

   The boldest lipstick I wore at the trial. A fuchsia-pink liquid lipstick that does NOT dry your lips out like the Kylie Kits. On sale on Amazon.

   

   7. Almay Lip Vibes Lipstick in Shade “Eat Cake”

   A matte- lipstick that gives you that bubble-gum pink shade almost identical to the custom one I had formulated at Lip Lap. This is the one I wore with my J-Lo t-shirt.

8. Charlotte Tilbury Luxury Palette in Shade “The Rock Chick”

   A cool-tone eye shadow quartet. The only eyeshadow I use. I wear it daily.

   

9. tarte lights, camera, lashes™ 4-in-1 volumizing & conditioning platinum mascara

   My favorite mascara. Gives you massive lashes that don’t clump up.

   

10. NARS Light Reflecting Advanced Skincare Medium Coverage Foundation in Shade “Santa Fe”

Brianna and I both use this foundation. It’s got great buildable coverage, gives you a glow and is super hydrating.

Full List of Links Here