Today's Topic: Think Pink
How to radicalise pink? I've been thinking about this issue for the last few weeks. Mainly because there is a dearth of colour this season and most of the clothes I like are in black and grey. So I'm desperate to find a way of pepping up my monochrome wardrobe. And a dash of pink, in make-up or accessories, seems to be a piquant way of doing it. Pink was on the catwalk this winter and next spring, at Marni for both seasons and Luella for next.
But oh, pink is deeply problematic for me. The issue is it is more than a colour; 
it is an ideologue of traditional femininity. I am a feminist, albeit one riddled with contradictions including my love of make-up. Pink throws up images of many things which are the antithesis of my feminist stance: Barbara Cartland, Katie Price and Barbie to name but three. Pink is the colour of little girls being indoctrinated into a life of simpering subservience and household drudgery. Germaine Greer railed against it in a diatribe in The Guardian last year.
So I'm trying to find ways of wearing it which lend it a punkier, more subversive, vital edge. I think the first step is to alight on an appropriate hue. The pinks that appeal to me most at the moment are robust, acidic, full bodied and bodacious shades: fuchsias, magentas, cyclamens and geraniums. Pinks that
are bleeding into reds or purples. I'm editing out anything blanched, pale and dilute. Ditto Pepto Bismol bubblegum hues – they are simply too cartoonish and kitsch. The pinks that are best have a soupcon of strangeness about them, a hint of the vitriol of purple or the voluptuous promise of red. This is where Pop's Lip Lust Balmy Lipstick in Flirty Fuchsia is spot on - it delivers a shot of really violent magenta to lips - or Becca's Glossy Lip Tint in Fuchsia Crush.
For me, the way to lend pink lipstick a really impactful, darker edge is to team with a graphic black eye – the sort executed by Pat McGrath at
Lanvin for Autumn Winter 08. This recontextualises the pink away from playful, naive girlishness and into a more modern, grown up, serious and arch place. Barry M's Liquid Eyeliner in Black is great for painting a thick graphic swathe of black on the eyelid to play off against Schiaparelli pink lips.
Blush pinks are another manifestation of the hue I can tolerate, probably because they put me in mind of Watteau and Fragonard and rococo ladies with pallid skin and suggestively flushed cheeks. The sort of women to be found gallivanting and frolicking in London's fabulous Wallace Collection art gallery - a favourite haunt of Vivienne Westwood. To replicate this kind of look, a sort of modern romantic, keep the face bare save for a bloom of Benefit's naturalistic Posie Tint, on cheeks and on lips. This will lend you the allure of a costume drama heroine: a highbrow comeliness without a hint of the saccharine, sucrose, candied, contrite and supine connotations pink, at its worst, can inspire.
Zoe Stephens, 26, Fashion Assistant from Hertfordshire
