This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
March — and I’ve got me an acute case of colour hunger — specifically for chilli. It started with Chinese New Year, a celebration at which I went hard, opportunities for festivity being thin on the ground. Presented with a dress code, as ever, I balked. “Ugh, not red,” I grouched. “Tad crashing, tad obv.”
Immediately I was clothed, this was superceded by: “Red is life! Red is fire! Feel me burn! I am flesh! I am power! I am war!” plus other girlish fancies.
Valentine’s Day is something I eschew as an occasion for amateurs, being someone who endeavours to have both a sex life and a life full stop. However, it does provide an opportunity for a spot of rosy drag.
And, now, as Mars’s month beckons, I’m feeling no less sanguine, an instinct that can segue into cruise wear. My colour craving feels instinctive, primordial, and red is the colour. If all about is grey, then — like Dorothy and her saturated slippers — I shall sally forth in Technicolor.
What does it all mean? Sex is the traditional referent. Red is the colour of innocence surrendered, the promise that is pink ripened into fecundity. In the Western tradition, scarlet women always boast something of the harlot; Eve’s apple is rarely depicted as green.
The lasciviousness of the Wife of Bath is there in her hose “of fyn scarlet reed”. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne must bear her scarlet letter, whilst Sting’s Roxanne is not putting on her red light to curl up with a good book.
No silver screen siren is complete without her carmined mouth: an ensign, blatant even in black and white, emblem of painted perfection begging to be besmirched. Red is the colour of rude health, but it can also be plain rude.
We may have surpassed raw-bottomed baboons in subtlety, yet still have the blush of orgasm, the crimson flush of shame, arousal’s engorged lips. Red may be the colour of stop signs, but, in the sexual sphere, it’s the signal to go, go, go.
What we’re talking about here is not so much lust, as lust spelling life. Red is not merely nature’s primary, but primal hue; the ur-colour against which all others feel sappy, insipid, blah. It is the first shade specified by name in almost all primitive cultures, and the colour most deployed in their art.
In ancient Hebrew tradition “Adam” means both alive and red, whilst prehistoric man daubed with blood anything he sought to summon to life. Still, today, ruddy art tends to fetch a higher price.
As for clothing, the first dyeing appears to have taken place between the 6th and 4th millennia BC, and the majority of the scraps left to us until the Roman era are red. For the Romans themselves, the words “coloured” (coloratus) and “red” (ruber) were synonymous.
Despite all the later sumptuary laws restricting florid ’fits to the ennobled, humanity’s hankering after the hue could not be suppressed. Red-dress woman doesn’t need telling that she is sporting the symbol of rebellion. She will already be busying herself, less the red under the bed than astride it.
Red looks sensational with pink or orange. However, right now, it is modish to juxtapose it with black, or don a full fire rig-out, right down to the stockings and shoes. You may want to bury yourself beneath the modern classic that is a vast, blanket-style scarf. Or those not ready for ruby robes can sate themselves with a crimson pout.
It has taken decades for me to discover a red lipstick I can do business with, being so blue-pale that even cherry tones can look satsuma. Make-up artist Lisa Eldridge has tetrachromacy, a genetic mutation allowing her to see more colours than the rest of us with savant nuance. Lisa Eldridge True Velvet Lip Colour in Velvet Duchess (£27, lisaeldridge.com) is a deep garnet inspired by the Forties’ shade favoured by royalty, used for Imelda Staunton’s monarch in The Crown.
Should you have the opposite problem — being warm-toned, meaning your reds look frigidly purple — then opt for True Velvet Lip Colour in Velvet Dragon, a rusty, Chinese lacquer red with yellow undertones.
Whilst, if you veer neither one way nor the other, True Velvet Lip Colour in Velvet Ribbon (£27) makes a terrific, pillar-box fillip. As portrait artist Lorna May Wadsworth tells me:
“A scarlet lip can make a painting, a lesson that can be applied to the face.” Now is the moment to see red.
Hannah Betts writes at hannahbetts.substack.com
