When do girls wear lipstick

Lipstick does serve a purpose beyond looking pretty -- many of them do condition and protect the fragile skin on the lips.

But other than its looks, why do women wear lipstick? One theory is that it emphasizes a woman's sexuality. By amping up the color of the lips, a woman is subconsciously echoing the color of her vaginal lips, or labia, in an effort attract attention from men. Another theory points out that young girls' lips are generally brighter in color than older women's, so women apply lipstick in an effort to appear younger and more attractive. Some researchers take this idea a step further and believe that using lipstick marks a desire to return to an infantile "rosebud mouth.

However, wearing lipstick can also be very empowering for women. When it still wasn't generally considered "nice" for women to wear lipstick, women during the suffrage movement in the late s and early s wore it to defy the norm.

The s power-suit-wearing woman sometimes considered her lipstick as part of her armor as she struggled to make her way in the male-dominated corporate world. Today, women in patriarchal societies and those under religious law such as Iran are forbidden to wear lipstick. For more on women, getting out lipstick stains and special-effects makeup, we've got links to articles you'll like below. Lipstick played a big part in the U.

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin became known for telling a joke with "lipstick" as the answer to the question "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?

President Barack Obama used the phrase "like putting lipstick on a pig," which basically means to disguise the reality of a situation by making a superficial change, to describe some of John McCain's campaign promises. In light of Palin's trademark joke, as well as the delicacy of having a female vice-presidential candidate, Obama was criticized by some for his choice of phrase. Sign up for our Newsletter! Teens should avoid dark and matted lips. The end result is a natural look that highlights—not hides—a teen's best features.

For girls who love wild colors, Brown says to experiment with nail polish, not makeup. Do you allow your daughter to wear makeup?

What rules do you have? Share your comments below. But we were at least teenagers by then. A new study conducted by Escentual. According to the survery, 38 percent of women think young girls are using cosmetics because they want to feel more grown up. So how young is too young? Take, for example, year-old model Thylane Loubry Blondeau, who appears on the April cover of French magazine Jalouse.

Sure, she looks much more age-appropriate than she did when Paris Vogue featured her two years ago. Facial symmetry and an even skin tone imply good health, while youthfulness denotes fertility. Many women spend hundreds of pounds each year on cosmetics, and as many minutes worrying about the way we look. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf makes a persuasive case that the beauty industry exists to control a generation of women in the process of emancipation.

Keep us anxious, keep us hungry, keep us ever vigilant in our quest for physical perfection, the argument goes, and you keep us down. As such, the message that your natural beauty is never enough is socialised into us very young.

I first started to wear makeup as a young teenager because I believed the freckles dusted across my cheeks were ugly. Studies repeatedly tell us that men are more attracted to women who wear makeup.

Of course, as the aforementioned Plautus was no doubt unaware, too much salt — a probable feature of life in ancient Rome due to the absence of refrigeration — can be a bad thing.