"You can't keep changing your men, so you settle for changing your lipstick."
Heather Locklear, American actress
Women have added color to their lips for at least five millennia. The earliest evidence of a colored paste or lipstick comes from Mesopotamia in around 3000 B.C.E. There, it was made of crushed semi-precious Jewels and then put on to the eyelids as well as the lips. Cleopatra, Pharoah of Egypt (69-30 B.C.E.) used crushed carmine beetles in a base made of ants as lipstick. Some formulations would have resulted in serious illness or even death, such as the Ancient Egyptian concoction from 1400, B.C.E., which used a red dye extracted from seaweed, mixed with iodine and toxic bromine compounds. In 1915, Maurice Levy invented the sliding tube that we know as lipstick. Levy's tubes were just 2 inches (5 cm) long. The sliding tube worked by a set of slide levers in the casing. In subsequent developments, Levy added a slide-and-twist mechanism, creating the lipstick tube as we know it today.
Lipstick, in its new and convenient form, caught the imagination of women in America and Europe from the early part of the twentieth century. Movie stars and other performers made it a relatively inexpensive luxury in an otherwise tough and unglamorous world of economic hardship and wartime.
