It’s sad, really, how misguided humans can be.
If women want to be more attractive to men, rather than to other women, then it’s a mistake to suddenly have giant, fat lips out of proportion to your face.
The eye registers that it's a face that nature intended to have thin lips, and so the effect is jarring.
The great mistake is to spend too much time staring in the mirror. You start to see faults where often there are none.
Big lips don’t suit everyone. And yet many women stare at themselves for too long in the mirror and the next thing they have had fillers or lip-plumping balm. And the next thing they look ridiculous.
Even the adverts for lip-plumping products show the models looking normal before – and, after, looking ridiculous.
I have never once heard a man say, ‘Well, I do think X is extremely attractive, but I am put off by her thin lips.’
Two of the thinnest-lipped women I know are married to two of the most attractive men. These women virtually have no lips; just slits in their faces.
It’s the whole package the man is interested in – the whole atmosphere that the woman brings with her.
Ask yourself – do I like Lucy/Mary/Frances/Rachel because she has big, fat lips extending out of their faces like lilos, or because she is nice and good company?
Apply the same rationale to any aspect of looks.
I am all for a woman veiling burst veins and black circles, tweezing beards and moustaches, and adding blusher to make herself look less deadly, and powder to mattify glistening.
But lip-fillers are a mistake.
Plumping ingredients can increase the flow of blood to the lips – ginger-root oil and capsicum peppers.
They sounds so natural, don't they? But the mixture tingles because it is being disruptive.
You can become tolerant and need to use more and more. And yet, in a balm, you are not supposed to use more than one per cent of such products.
One nice woman, who sadly recently died, got married for the first time at the age of 53 to one of the richest men in the world. With access to the best plastic surgeons, she had lip extensions which turned out to be wrongly sized and could not be reversed. She just misjudged what was necessary through staring at her face in the mirror for too long.
So forget lip-plumper. But lip balms (which include sun-protection factors) are necessary. In summer, our lips become dry because they don’t have sebum like the rest of our skin. And we lose a lot of moisture in the heat.
If you are a mouth-breather, you generate more dryness, as do lip-lickers – an enzyme in saliva dries lips out.
Most lip balms are just Vaseline, with something else added so the manufacturers can charge more. But Vaseline is fine on its own and it’s the cheapest. Vaseline Rosy Lips SPF 15 Lip Balm is a roll-up stick costing £2.25. No need to pay more.
Those who prefer lanolin to Vaseline can buy Lansinoh’s 100-per-cent-natural lip balm for £6.99. Breastfeeding mothers discovered its efficacy as a lip balm when they saw how well it worked to soothe cracked nipples.
But lipstick will do the same job of lubrication and it’s a more glamorous thing to carry around. But beware the Cruella de Vil look – worse when the lipstick bleeds into the ‘pleats’ between lip and nose.
For years, we associated glamour with Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and their glistening red lips.
But children and men are often subliminally frightened by women with blood-red slashes across the centre of their faces. Sometimes it has its origin in fear of clowns – or coulrophobia.
Women, according to my dental consultant, like to use bright lipstick when they’ve had their teeth whitened – it sets off the whitened teeth nicely.
A Huffington Post poll asked 20 men what they thought about lipstick. One said, ‘I don’t understand why some women think wearing lipstick with shorts and a T-shirt is normal. It just looks bizarre. It would be like if I wore a tie with shorts and a T-shirt.’
At the Met Gala this year, it was clear that nude lipsticks – as worn by Twiggy in the 1960s – have made a comeback in older women. Pamela Anderson was leading the field. So many lips were ‘naked’, whether matte or glossy. The Goth look has peaked.
I don’t want to be a killjoy.
Buy lipstick by all means – but search for one that could possibly look as though your lips were naturally that colour. Pink is absurd. No one’s lips are pink.
Red, please – and matte.
