About lipstick ...

My dear fabulous daughter,

This is actually an open rant to womankind.

You probably own more than one tube of off-coloured lipstick. You know what I’m talking about - that tube you bought when you were thinking it was time to change up the colour of your lips, just for fun, just to add a little pizzazz to your face. After all, when you dabbed the tester on the back of your hand or on the inside of your wrist, it looked pretty good, right?

You got home, swiped the tube over your lips (which, by the way, bear no resemblance whatsoever to the colour of the back of your hand or the inside of your wrist), smiled at yourself in the mirror and … dang … you then daubed on a second coat in hopes it might improve the look. With a flooding sense of disappointment, you wiped the double coating off with a tissue, reapplied a single coat, then brushed some gloss on top to try to tone it down or perk it up… %#$@!! 

Now you own a tube of unsuitable lipstick and you can’t just throw it away - that would be extravagantly wasteful; even if you wiped the barely used edge off with a paper towel, it’s no longer pristine, so your favourite women’s charity won’t accept it – despite your best efforts it has that creepy look inherent to someone else’s used (contaminated) lipstick. You might pass it along to a close girlfriend, or try to return it to the store, but in the meantime it languishes in your cosmetic drawer until one morning you realize you’ve run out of lip balm and use that near-at-hand neglected lipstick instead.

When you sit down at the breakfast table you don’t think about the mixed messages you’re sending your significant other, dressed as you are in your tired old bathrobe with the week-old yoghurt drip on the lapel, with your sleep-tousled hair standing on end, with creases from your pillow case indented on the side of your early-morning-pale face, and your lips sporting a most unbecoming shade of red aptly named Frankly Scarlet. At that point, my dear, you don't give a damn...