Why did Adolf Hitler hate red lipstick?

Throughout history, there is a clear relationship between makeup and the perception of women at every historical moment. When women have enjoyed more rights and freedoms, makeup has emerged with greater strength and prominence. In Ancient Egypt, for example, women had the right to own and inherit property, run their businesses, and initiate legal proceedings against men. This status was aesthetically translated into powerful makeup with red lips and alcohol-lined eyes. Conversely, when patriarchy has stifled women's autonomy, makeup has been muted and harshly punished. Such is the case with several medieval church councils, which considered makeup a sin for deceiving male desire, and during the Salem witch trials (1691), it was branded as a means of diabolical seduction.

This close relationship between makeup and women's status is due to the fact that conservative thinking has often imposed strict moral dictates on women that restrict their sexual freedom. Thus, red lips and pink cheekbones, which, according to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, are sexual signals that recreate youth and the vigor of health, distance women from the sexual castration to which they have been subjected throughout history. Furthermore, red is one of the colors with the longest wavelengths, which makes it stand out and attracts the attention of others, and jeopardizes the idea that women reserve themselves exclusively for their husbands.

Although makeup has never been restricted to a social elite, it must be understood within a class bias, since among privileged women, explicit makeup has not been well-received. In fact, the privileged classes have always been attributed a moral superiority that had to be aesthetically visible, and precisely because of the sexual connotations of makeup, it brought these women dangerously close to debauchery and prostitution. With this premise and under the strict Puritan morality of her reign, Queen Victoria of England outlawed makeup and contributed to making paleness of women's faces the new ideal of bourgeois beauty.

During the Nazi regime, Hitler and his ideological apparatus imposed a very controlling, conservative, and puritanical vision of the female body, with an ideal of "natural" femininity dedicated to motherhood, family, and obedience. For this reason, overly striking makeup—and especially red lipstick—was seen by Hitler as a symbol of decadence and foreign influence (especially from Hollywood), associated with women considered degenerates, such as prostitutes or communists. Consequently, during World War II in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, red lipstick was used as a symbolic act of female resistance and haughty pride in the face of occupation. So much so that Winston Churchill did not include it in rationing and always encouraged British women to wear red lipstick. Firstly, as a defiant gesture towards the Nazis and, secondly, so that its sensual beauty would boost the morale of the combatants.

And it is precisely here that we reach one of the dead ends to which the cultural perception of red lipstick leads us. On the one hand, it has become a tool of feminist protest, from suffragism to the present day, as a reflection of power, security, and self-control of one's image, under the motto of lipstick feminism. But on the other hand, just as Churchill wanted women to wear makeup to please men, red lips have also become a clear reflection of the sexualization of women, condemned to having to satisfy male desire.