Beauty Blast From The Past: Growing Up Lipstick

Calling all lipstick lovers! Ever wonder where your fixation with lip products began? Look no further! We’ve dug up some favorite lipstick ephemera from our childhood to refresh your hazy memories, and help you recall the early stages of makeup addiction. Don’t fret, we were there too. Who would have thought that an innocent piece of candy or a vital school supply would play such a crucial role in our obsession with sticks, glosses, balms, and more? Take a look at some of the best in childhood lipstick nostalgia and don’t worry—even though your current makeup stash may be growing out of control, at least your lips look fierce!

Candy Lipstick

Growing up, our frequent after school sweet shop binges usually resulted in a handful of candy lipsticks. The two-inch plastic tubes came in red, pink, purple, and orange, and held a powdery candy stick that tasted tangy like Sweet Tarts. We remember fondly scraping the fruity candy sticks across our mouth—was it the candy itself or the scraping that turned our lips red? Either way, candy lipstick was the ultimate treat for grade-school makeup mavens and wee drag queens in training. Thank Sathers for starting our cosmetic cravings early!

Lipstick Erasers

The definitive school supply for the elementary makeup obsessive. Lipstick erasers rubbed out our pencil lines just as good as any old Pink Pearl but the roll-up plastic tube looked just like mommy’s staple Revlon. Our favorite was grape-scented and glittery, but it still looked oh-so-mature and womanly nestled in the bottom of our plastic clutch—okay, our pencil case. We’re still not sure what lipstick has to do with erasing, but at any rate it provided a novel classroom distraction.

Lip Gloss Rings

Fruity, fab, and always at hand—lip gloss jewelry was the ultimate cosmetic option for ‘90s preteens. The novelty of having your wackiest albeit tackiest jewelry double as a grown-up pot of gloss put a stop to us stealing our older sister’s tinted tubes. Though for many, lip gloss rings conjure up memories of mall trips to Claire’s, several companies still produce lip gloss rings, including ‘90s favorite Hard Candy. Though lip gloss rings may not be the most fashion-forward trend, wearing them nowadays will make you the most most popular kid on Tumblr.

Flavored Chapstick

The invention of fun-flavored chapstick played such a crucial role in our child and teen years that the mere thought of it not existing seems, well—flavorless. Our Bonne Bell Lip Smackers in Strawberry, Vanilla, and Watermelon were an extra-special treat that we could get away with gliding on any old time, and collecting the ever-growing array of exotic balm flavors was a habit we convinced our parents to support based on the simple idea that lip balm is good for you. The result was baby soft lips for life and more expired tubes sitting in our makeup drawer than we ever could have anticipated.