Women in ancient Egypt favored blue-black lip color or reddish magenta and scented ointment painted on with a wet stick of wood. Cosmetics were considered so vital during this period that they were even put in a woman's tomb for her use in the afterlife, a pot of lip rouge was discovered in the tomb of a queen buried in 2500 B.C. in Mesopotamia.

In Ancient Rome a reddish purple mercuric dye called fucus (a potentially deadly poison)  and sediments from red wine were sold at the market for use in lip rouge. Popaea, the wife of Emperor Nero had no less than 100 attendants to maintain her looks and engaged in beauty rituals around the clock, religiously keeping her lips painted

In Elizabethan England, coloring lips with crayons made from alabaster or plaster of Paris, tinted red, became popular. Despite the variety of artificial lip-reddeners available, women in prim-and-proper Victorian times frequently "bit" their lips to make them appear rosy. In eighteenth century colonial America a thrifty lipstick option was sucking lemons throughout the day to give lips a real zinger redness. Puritan settlers rubbed snips of red ribbon onto their mouths when no one was looking. Around 1770 in Britain a woman could be arrested if she wore lipstick since it implied that she was trying to trick a man into marriage with false advertising. She could even be labeled a witch.

In the nineteenth century Queen Victoria publicly declared that makeup was impolite. Actors made lip and cheek rouge by mixing pigmented powder with butter or lard. The actress Sarah Bernhardt created one of the biggest scandals of the time by applying lip rouge in public. Lip rouge was spoken of as the most indecent of all makeup.

By the twentieth century, lip coloring had become more accepted, although it wasn't until after World War I that women comfortably wore cosmetics in public. In the early part of the century, women kept their lip rouge in delicate glass jars on their dressing tables. The French company Guerlain introduced lip rouge in a stick form taking the product beyond the walls of theater and into posh shops. The Guerlain products were available to a limited aristocratic clientele. In 1915 the Scovil Manufacturing company first packaged lipstick in portable metal cartridges similar to what we use today. The first cases were simple two-inch long cylinders, in plain, nickel finish, with a sliding bar to eject the lipstick. These new lipstick products were available to the masses and became popular with the new force of working women.

During the twenties, the number of women wearing lipstick increased dramatically. The new fashions of the day-short, flirty skirts, bobbed hair-called for more make up and lipstick. Silver screen actresses with the help of Max Factor gave makeup its glamorous image with women copying the shape of their favorites actress's lips. In 1923, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post noted that as many as 50 million American women were using lipstick. Cosmetics became the fourth largest industry in America.

By the thirties and forties, with the advent of Technicolor, women copied lipstick color as well as shapes. Lipstick was available in a wide range of colors. By the start of World War II, lipstick was an accepted necessity. In fact, America's War Production Board determined lipstick was a "vital product" that kept up women's spirits. Women horded their lipsticks and Nurses evacuated by submarines during the war would escape clutching only a few items, one of them always their lipstick.

The fifties gave the lipstick world a new consumer target with "the teenager" influenced by such icons as Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. In the sixties woman wanted a lipstick that made them look like they weren't wearing lipstick.

Disco, Punk and Heavy Metal dominated the seventies and eighties and entertainers of both genders were wearing lipstick on stage and off. Purple and black lipstick shades were predominant. Brown shades of all dimensions prevailed in the nineties and flavored lipsticks became the rage.

The new millennium has baby boomers worrying about lines and wrinkles. Lipsticks now multi-task by providing ingredients to treat, moisturize and protect as well as color.