“She has a way with words, red lipstick, and making an entrance.” – Kate Spade

If we’ve ever met, I can guarantee you’ve never seen me without my red lipstick. It’s very rare I leave the house without it. This is only for about 10% vanity reasons because I do believe I look better when I wear it. But the overwhelming 90% is because I think there is magic in red lipstick… magic to make me into my best and fiercest self.

But I don’t want to talk about that yet. I want to talk about the reason I started wearing the red lipstick in the first place. It’s not a reason anyone’s going to be thrilled with: I didn’t choose it. It was chosen for me.

When I started high school in the late 2000s, my mother (who is in no way vain) became obsessed with me having a trademark. And so, she took me into a hot-popcorn-selling-superstore and bought me two tubes of different red lipstick by L’Oreal. I distinctly remember wanting nothing to do with those two tubes of red lipstick, and I remember why. When it came to putting on lipstick, I was terrible.

Again, if we’ve met, this is probably pretty funny for you to hear. With the exception of me after I eat pizza and the red bleeds onto my chin, my lipstick game is pretty fierce. My command of red lipstick is perhaps greater than my command of the English language, and I’ve been working with the latter for fifteen additional years. I can even play with different techniques, like creating a subtle heart shape around at the crest of my top lip. But that’s now that I’m an adult woman, and I’ve been working with lipstick since my freshman year of high school. In all the years before that, I applied my makeup like The Joker—poorly, and with the intention of scaring the pants off everyone in my city and the neighboring towns.

Another thing I don’t talk about much: I am an ex-ballerina. As an ex-ballerina, I was forced to wear blazing red lipstick for every performance, even before I was a junior high student. By the time my dancing friends and I got to the end of junior high, they could all stand in front of the mirror and apply their own lipstick before the show. But since I was so miserable with a tube, my mother had to take me aside, in front of everyone, and apply the lipstick for me. Imagine being fourteen years old and standing in front of all your friends, mouth wide open, while your mother puts Penelope Cruz’s special edition red on your lips because you don’t have a steady enough hand. And in case you can’t imagine it, here’s a little something from personal experience: It was horrible.

So, yeah. Perhaps my acceptance of the lipstick was a strange way of grabbing onto some sort of autonomy.

But after a few weeks of wearing the L’Oreal lipstick to school everyday, I suddenly felt special. Interesting. It was more than just a few girls politely saying that they liked my lipstick, although that’s always nice to hear. Suddenly, I felt like I was in the lipstick, and the lipstick was in me. Like we were soul mates. My voice got louder. I took myself more seriously. It was incredible, and I’m almost sure it had something to do with my new lipstick.

Also, when I sat with a bunch of my friends at lunch, and water bottles got mixed up, I always knew which one was mine. Nobody else had Blushing Berry wrapped around the cap. So, not only was I the one with the really weird name, but also, I was the one with those red lips. And I get it. I’m not the first person in the world to wear lipstick, and as we grew up, my friends and peers started to wear it sometimes, too. But lipstick is more than just something fun for me. It’s a big part of my personal aesthetic (a word that means as much to us now as it did in Victorian England, but I digress). When I paint my lips red and throw that old leather jacket over my shoulders, I feel about ready to take on the world.

I’ve seen some of my best days in red lipstick. I had my first slow dance with a boy I really liked in Rouge Velour by Lancôme. I got an A on a ridiculously hard Vietnam history exam in Jezebel by the same company. And I finally became the editor-in-chief of the university’s literary journal in Red Revival by Revlon. One of the saddest days in my aesthetic history was the day I ran out of Rouge Velour, only to go to the Lancôme counter at Macy’s to find it had been discontinued. A photo of what the lipstick looked like is below:

(It was like someone had crushed up rubies and put them in a tube and sold it at a ridiculously high price. Worth every penny. RIP, Rouge Velour.)

I don’t really know who I was before I began to paint my lips red. Maybe I wasn’t anyone at all. But the red lips are part of me, and I don’t just mean that in a very obvious I-wouldn’t-be-able-to-do-my-two-favorite-things-speaking-and-eating kind of way. They’ve taught me how to be a fiercer person. Wearing red lipstick has instilled within me the truth that I don’t want to go through life unnoticed. Red lips turn heads, whether that’s in disgust, fascination, or both. I’m proud to have them. They are the visual representation of the person I want to be (and the person I hope I’ve become since the first time I put the tube to my lips). Maybe I do have a way with words and making an entrance, Kate Spade. But I think you and I both know I owe it to the lipstick.

(Me, in my red-lips-leather-jacket-everyday aesthetic. Even when I don’t look like this anymore, remember. I looked like this once.)