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"  Saturday, 6:30 a.m.: Bleary-eyed and wan, I&amp;#039;m waiting in line for the ladies&amp;#039; room at New Delhi&amp;#039;s Indira Gandhi airport when I feel a tap on my shoulder. &amp;quot;Excuse me,&amp;quot; says a middle-aged British mum, who is with her young daughter. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re that magazine woman, aren&amp;#039;t you? The beauty woman on GMTV wearing black lipstick?&amp;quot; My notoriety has officially gone global.  The black lipstick rolled into my life one rainy London Tuesday last winter when the publicist for Shu Uemura spilled a cluster of primary-color tubes\u2014&amp;quot;the new Rouge Unlimited,&amp;quot; she said\u2014across our lunch table (I&amp;#039;m the beauty director of London&amp;#039;s Sunday Times style magazine). There were blue, yellow, red, green\u2014but I snapped up the black and tested it on my hand: a good, thick, impenetrable matte pigment. Perfection!  Mind you, this was the season of Chanel Black Satin nail lacquer; Essie Licorice polish; Comme des Gar\u00E7ons&amp;#039; black-bottled Guerilla fragrance. Ebony didn&amp;#039;t just make sense\u2014it struck me as definite, absolute, extreme; reminiscent of the deep violet lips (well, they look savagely dark on black-and-white celluloid, at least) of 1930s film heroines like Marlene Dietrich. It put me in mind of electronic diva Alison Goldfrapp, who is currently mining the art deco\u2013nostalgic aesthetic of the early &amp;#039;70s, when legendary London \u00FCber-boutique Biba was making\u2014you guessed it\u2014onyx lipstick.  I&amp;#039;d already been wearing M.A.C Media, a deep, poisonous purple. And although I&amp;#039;m no emo kid and have never been a Goth (I&amp;#039;m 35 and wear Marni, Lanvin, or Balenciaga most days), the uncompromising black struck a chord in my melancholy, Smiths-loving, Cathy Earnshaw\u2013obsessed heart.  The lipstick debuted at our magazine&amp;#039;s holiday party, where it stood in piquant contrast to the Hollywood glamour of my emerald satin Diane von Furstenberg dress. As we chattered over porcini ravioli, none of my fashionable colleagues appeared to notice. Eventually, even I forgot I had it on.  But later, over cocktails and Kate Bush anthems at a nearby bar, I noticed a balding middle-aged man giving me\u2014well, my mouth\u2014a quizzical, slightly horrified stare. I reapplied the lipstick extra-thick and shot him a &amp;#039;50s-housewife-at-a-Tupperware-party smile. He disappeared into the night.  In February, I was asked to recommend my favorite products on GMTV, the British Good Morning America, which has 6 million viewers nationwide. I didn&amp;#039;t really think about whether black lipstick would look good on camera, or what the consequences might be\u2014after all, no one in my office had batted an eyelash. I just scrawled it on. (Liberally. Black takes a few coats, sans lipliner, which I&amp;#039;m not high-maintenance enough to bother with.) I teamed it with a piercing blue-and-sea-green Sonia Delauney\u2013style print ensemble (colorful and artsy) that I wear regularly to the office, and off I went to the South Bank Studios, near the Tate Modern. Halfway through my list (Vaishaley facial wash; a metallic Chanel palette; K\u00E9rastase hair masque), the cameraman politely asked, &amp;quot;Is your lipstick green?&amp;quot;  But when the piece aired several weeks later, the show&amp;#039;s host, Lorraine Kelly (a mumsy, frumpy archetype of conformity adored by stay-at-home viewers), trashed my look on the air. &amp;quot;Scary! Horrible!&amp;quot; she shrieked. The next day, I was in a cab crossing town when my deputy, Helen, called me. &amp;quot;Something&amp;#039;s happened that you&amp;#039;re not going to like,&amp;quot; she said. When I arrived in the office, she passed me a page out of London Lite, one of our daily newspapers. &amp;quot;And You Say You&amp;#039;re a Beauty Expert,&amp;quot; the headline raged. According to the article, I&amp;#039;d frightened poor Lorraine out of her wits with my &amp;quot;dyed orange hair&amp;quot; and black lipstick! It, and subsequent articles, questioned how I could operate as a beauty editor while looking so freakish and abject. I might as well have been a dentist with rotten teeth or a dermatologist with cystic acne\u2014as far as the tabloids were concerned, I was a blight on my profession.  As I later explained in my weekly Times column, they were correct: I am not a bland, blond beauty doyenne with tasteful highlights, a bronzed complexion, and waxed, tanned limbs. This would be a kind of death for me. I have screeching red hair (think amped-up Karen Elson), milky skin, and a taste for experimental and vibrant makeup. This works in the context of a fashion magazine. Transferred to the comfy couches of suburban Middle England, it&amp;#039;s a lot more exotic.  But I work in fashion, for God&amp;#039;s sake! I&amp;#039;m not supposed to be shackled by conformity. My job is to fly free, to treat my face and body as an artistic canvas, to use the myriad colors and products at my disposal as a means of self-expression. Judging by the outpouring of support from industry types, plenty of my fellow fashion devotees were thrilled to see someone standing up and rebelling against the beauty stereotype.  Still, the episode demonstrated that, sadly, our ideas about beauty are more conformist than ever. If my minor display caused outrage, what hope is there for the celebrity who braves conceptual fashion, or the model who sports blue lipstick, or...you? Will everyone be zealously style-policed\u2014forever consigned to the fashion-blooper section of the tabloids?  I yearn for a day when a raging tribe of eccentrics will kick down the walls of celebrity culture and stage a sit-in with face paints and green lips and all the unpalatable, indigestible flourishes of Edith Sitwell and Isabella Blow, that stylist and muse\u2014and grande dame of creative dressing\u2014whose death in May reminded the fashion faithful that eccentric women have become a rare and fragile breed. In the meantime, I&amp;#039;ll keep exploring the lip-color spectrum, including, most recently, a rather putrid fungal green, a sunshine yellow, and an Yves Klein blue. Polychromatic perversity can be a lot of fun. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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