Puta Red: The Colour of our Generation

Initially, the colour or the shade did not matter.

            Sitting by the windowpane on an extremely cold Wednesday morning, my eyes are set into an apertural vision towards my male Creative Writing professor when I was distracted by a pleasing visual sensation somewhere along 10:00 [my eyes being the point of reference]. My classmate, Taz, was positioned in a very eye-catching spot in the room, somewhere along the centre aisle, wearing a vibrant and loud red lipstick. I took out a mirror and examined my lip colour; I was looking more and more pallid.

            The manner her lips move towards different directions when she speaks and the slow, seemingly-out-of-a-movie gliding actions she does seemed as if there is a rollercoaster of brand new human experiences tingling the glutton within me. My eyes slither with every movement of her lips. My throat would tease my mouth by remaining dry for seconds; my hand would gently caress my stomach as if I was copulating with a big bowl of hot, spicy Ramyun.

It was almost a sensationalize feeling of love at first sight; but then the professor signalled the dismissal of the class and I had to say goodbye to what we came to know as the perfect puta red lipstick.

Thinking about how long I would have to wait to reunite with my newfound eye candy seemed eternal.

            It took me back to how I choose and buy my lipsticks. The retelling of this story to a multitude of people, some who I already knew and some who I just met, would be as painful as waking up at 1:00 in the afternoon to attend your CMSC 2 class and stop your siesta. It was like a tug-of-war between the desire to pull people in and the fear of being pushed away.

            On my 17^th birthday, mom handed me a present. It was probably the most disappointingly wrapped present I have received in 17 years; it was in a super small gift wrapper. The size took away all of my excitement to open it, but I did so, nonetheless. It was one of those moments when you think of a plausible rationale why a person would give such a gift knowing that it is not within your circle of interest, or expectation for the matter.

Mom gave me my first lipstick, baby pink was written on the bottom part of it.

            With a huge question mark drawn all over my face, mom gave me a kiss on the right cheek and said, “Dalaga ka na e. Happy birthday.” and all of a sudden, it made sense. That particular instance started the lipstick story.

            Like a baby, I almost asked why I cannot have the shade she was wearing and she answered me briefly. She said it was not the colour for my age. Red, according to her, is colour for strong, working women.

            However, unlike other people, I love to rationalize why I am sort of hooked into collecting different shades in the hopes of finding that one, perfect colour that would make me empowered as a woman and as someone belonging to the middle class of the social structure and perhaps with a stubborn desire to prove my mom wrong, that red can be my colour as well.  

            I was in the make-up section of a small provincial mall in Ilagan Isabela called Northstar Mall when a woman, about 40 to 50 years of age inquired for a deeper shade of maroon in the Ever Bilena line.

The saleslady looking almost like a pale white siopao drizzled with an overly red eye shadow, blush-on and lipstick, almost like using the lipstick to create an entire look, gladly raided the entire rack to help the woman find her shade.

As the saleslady was busy finding what she was asked to find, my mom exclaimed the name of the old woman and made beso with her. I overhear her starting a little chat with the woman and even asked her her free time to visit us in the house for manicures and pedicures. So, I completely assumed it was mom’s manicurist. The woman told my mom that her daughter is getting married that weekend and she needed to buy a lipstick for it. I still remember her words to describe the wedding, “Kay judge lang. Mahal kasi”.

After about ten minutes of going back and forth and reading all the lipstick labels, the saleslady finally handed over a red tube of lipstick with a shade close to what the old woman asked for. Looking amply satisfied, the woman asked for the price.

            “155 pisos ma’am. Waterfruf na rin po siya, matagal matanggal”, the saleslady responded.

            The wide, satisfied smile turned into a face of apprehension. The old woman immediately reached into her bag [my guess is that she counted how much many she has at the moment] and told the saleslady, “Sige. Balik na lang ako”.

            At first, I really did not understand what is so expensive about a hundred and fifty five pesos. I own at least three of those products and they were the cheapest in my collection. The image of the old woman walking out the store without being able to purchase what she came there for etched a lasting memory. Only when I was having my internship in Mandaluyong that I was able to give a reasonable justification for the woman, the lipstick and the P155.

            I was sent into an undercover task by my supervisor when she spotted my workstation and realized I was done with the tasks for the day and was ready to go home. She only gave me bits of information to work with, not exactly an elaborate discussion on what I should actually do and who should I be watching and/or following but from what she said I got that I need to secretly follow two people hired to do ‘flyering’ [flyer distribution] as part of the company’s advertising initiatives.

These people, according to my supervisor, are contractual workers needed to be monitored and documented that tasks are really being executed properly at the specified time frame.

            It was not really a big of a deal and I did not mind going out of the office to do field works until my boss instructed me to go from Mandaluyong to Guadalupe. Not just take a cab to Guadalupe but to walk from Mandaluyong to a certain spot and then ride the MRT to Guadalupe and then march under the heat of the Q.C sun just to look for two guys I never met wearing black shirts giving away flyers to people and take pictures of them. I started shaking and it felt like I was going to barf any moment [ I have never commuted in my life and now my boss expects me to commute in a place I am a total stranger to ].

            Immediately, I headed to the comfort room to remove my loud, fuchsia lipstick and applied a colourless balm probably because of the paranoia of attracting the attention of snatchers and drug addicts along the way. Adding fuel to the fire, I was in my corporate attire with a pair of high heels.

            At about 45 minutes of looking for strangers and taking a couple of pictures of people whose faces I am not even sure of, I noticed a weird, sticky feeling on my face. My lip balm is already melting which I took as a sign of resignation from the task. I waited for a cab and told the driver to drive me to Megamall.

            I took advantage of the bad traffic to freshen up and realized I did not bring a spare lip balm of lipstick and so upon arriving at the mall, the first section I went to visit was the make-up section. The brand I was browsing products from was Nichido, a super small within the wide array of make-up stalls inside the department store.

 The most varied make-up products one will ever see, from Philippine drugstore products like Ever Bilena, Fashion 21, Nichido, Kokuryu, LOL to sort of high-end products like Maybelline, Revlon, Max Factor, Clinique amongst others, are inside just one building.

            Looking for a shade I still do not have [probably bordering from plum and wine shades], I see a woman [maybe in her 20s], wearing black pumps, high-waist skirt and an office coat; almost like someone fresh out of a magazine [ this is the part when I raised my eyebrows and examined the woman from head to toe. A very ‘teleserye’ move, I know. ].

The woman was holding a grocery basket [the ones SM Department store uses], and was carelessly and casually pulling out about three shades of Revlon lipsticks [one costs P450. FYI.]; checking out the shades and then putting them inside the grocery basket alongside a couple pieces of clothing.

This particular instance took me back into the old woman walking out the mall without the lipstick she chose just because she found P155 too expensive for a make-up product. I started looking at lipsticks in a different light from that moment.

Not only that such lip colour conceals physical lip imperfections, creates a dominating and empowered look for women, and infuses a heightened level of confidence; but it represents how this society basically operates.

I still haven’t found the perfect shade but I look at Taz’ every time we meet for ENG 106 and get seated on my favourite place in the room, admiring the colour puta red. Puta in this context does not actually imply sexual undertones and promiscuity but is reflective of how it manages to trigger an experience only comprehended by people with the same level of affinity to lipsticks.

With a friend, I stomped through the humble department store SM Calamba has to find my own variation of puta red; my own shade of instigating memory and social involvement, my own colour of defying my generation, my own puta red.

Puta red, therefore, is an exemplary illustration of how Taz came about the juxtaposition of the concept of the shade with being the colour of our generation.