Katya Rogers: Oh, hey there. It's me, Katya OTM's, executive producer. I have some great news. We were cleaning out our tote bag closet. Yes, every public radio station has one, and we found a box of our exclusive lipsticks that I want to offer to you guys as a special gift right now. There are only 50 left, so don't sleep on it. Go to onthemedia.org, become a member, and get one of these things before they're all gone for good. Here's Brooke with the Lipstick Origin Story.

Brooke: It was Poppy King's idea, lipstick designer extraordinaire. Last year, Elle Australia listed her Frog Prince lipstick as one of the most iconic shades of all time. She's a devoted listener too, so she designed in collaboration with the show a special lipstick offered entirely free of charge to us that is, not to you. Stay tuned till the end of this interview for instructions on how to get your hands on one of these lipsticks. Anyway, a while back I asked Poppy about her unified theory of lipstick.

Poppy King: My theory is that, unlike other makeup, mascara, blush, which conceals, corrects, or enhances, lipstick is very much about who you are inside and--

Brooke: What if you are coral on the inside but burgundy is what suits you?

Poppy: The best way I can describe it is Meg Ryan and Scarlett Johansson. If you picture both of those ladies, they have very similar coloring, but they're totally different personas, and your persona is a combination of nature and nurture. Lipstick is much more about the gateway to who you are and the messages that you're giving yourself, most importantly, and then the message that you want to give the outside world.

Brooke: For you a creator, it isn't just what you want to tell about yourself to the outside world, it's how you interpret the outside world in your creations, as you've told us. You look at the world through a lipstick lens.

Poppy: I do indeed. I was not really a girly girl. I was a very, how do I put it? Female versus girly.

Brooke: Feminine.

Poppy: Exactly. I've started getting fascinated with the female experience because I was very aware that I wasn't, or I didn't feel feminine because I have frizzy hair, I have a large nose. I had the physicality that was more associated when I was little to a witch than to the princess. Anyway, I think it was when I started to think about, well, I want to embrace the female experience. What type of female am I going to be? Because all my conservative friends' mothers seemed to wear pink lipstick, all my mother's friends seemed dark lipstick. No, I excited to see a tribal element to it. I saw the language of it before I saw the lens.

The lens is really when I realized that lipstick was so related in my mind anyway, to ultimately geopolitical factors, but I didn't think that at seven.

Brooke: Well, what did you think when your father died?

Poppy: My father was a Freudian psychiatrist. Talk about the plot thickening. I wonder what he would make of such a phallic thing but my father got diagnosed with skin cancer when he was only 38, and I was 5, so he died at 40. That was the exact time that I went into a fantasy world that for me, was about glamour. I've often thought in the last 10 years about the relationship between glamour and trauma and I think the classic example is Marilyn Monroe. I think dealing with mortality at such a young age the darker my world got, the more I just wanted to be a superhero and boys have their superhero capes and superman. To me, a female superhero was glamour. It was an armor, it wasn't beauty.

I didn't actually feel capable of participating in beauty. I felt very, very awkward about my looks, but I felt like glamour, there was a democracy to it. That it's about your spirit, which takes me back to the type of lipstick that you're going to like wearing and enjoy wearing is one that relates to your spirit. The spirit you have or the spirit you want, but it's about the spirit. Once I snuck off with one of my mother's lipsticks just right in the time when my father was really dying. That was the first time that I really tried one on, on my own, and suddenly I just felt capable of dealing with things. When I put on that dark blood-red lipstick that my mother used to wear.

I would've looked very strange. I was about seven but it felt like it connected me to an inner source of power. What it did to me on the outside was really so much less interesting to me than what it did to me on the inside.

Brooke: Now take me to your work and politics and when you started using the latter to inspire the former.

Poppy: When it really solidified was when I realized I went through my teenage years. Awkward enough, let alone being a teenager in the '80s. You're going through your awkward period in a very awkward fashion. I was looking for lipsticks like the one that I tried on when I was seven. These blood red, old fashion style lipsticks given relative to the '80s style lipsticks at the time. That's when I realized that I felt my least awkward when I emulated the 1940s.

Brooke: I totally see that.

Poppy: Because I stopped trying to fit in with the beauty look of the day.

Brooke: It was a time of power for women. It was the war years.

Poppy: It was the war and--

Brooke: Women were taking over the home front in huge numbers.

Poppy: Exactly. Of course, I didn't know about things like Rosie the Riveter there and all that stuff but I really identify with the idea of, for want of a better word, the femme fatale who is not pretty, but who is powerful and strong but also to me, the best femme fatales had a big heart.

Brooke: How old were you?

Poppy: I was 17.

Brooke: It was two years later you started your own company?

Poppy: Yes, it was called Poppy. It was about my story, but also what I love is the poppy flower, which was both beautiful and dangerous.

Brooke: Tell me about how you drilled down in creating your lipsticks.

Poppy: So many of the lipsticks I've created in the last 15 years since I've been in America and living in New York, really were triggered by either something that I heard on public radio or something that I read in The New Yorker.

Brooke: Give me an example.

Poppy: A while ago, I think it was Radiolab, it must have been about 10 years ago, did a big thing about the recreation of the Big Bang Theory. At the time I was under a lot of pressure to make a lip gloss.

Brooke: Terrible, terrible world problem.

Poppy: Terrible pressure. Basically, I was under pressure as I always find to try and be more commercial, which I really don't enjoy. I remember listening to this thing all about the Big Bang Theory and particles and everything expanding out. I ended up doing a lip gloss called The Big Bang Theory. It was my theory that you could make your lips bigger and more convex by having a shine not dissimilar to the milky way. That's a very obvious one. Another one that I would love to do is I would really love to do one around 1913 because I had a fabulous--

Brooke: Sara Fishco piece. Sara Fishco is a cultural reporter here at WNYC.

Poppy: You get the general gist. Public radio for me is pretty much where my best lipstick ideas come from.

Brooke: How is it Poppy that I have the delight of hosting you in the studio? How did you get here?

Poppy: Well, chutzpah, how I've got anywhere. No, I'm tearing up because you say delight. This just really is a dream come true. I've always been a big fan of On the Media, always loved listening to On the Media. I recently upgraded my membership amount and WNYC being the responsible station that it is. They got back to me to say, "We noticed that you've upgraded your whatever. We just want to make sure it wasn't a mistake."Humble people that you are. I struck up a dialogue with your membership services people saying, oh, I'm such a fan and I have a lipstick company. A lot of my lipstick ideas come from-- I didn't really have any broader agenda.

It's just I was so excited when somebody reached out to me from WNYC. Anyway, and then about three weeks later, I got a wonderful-

Brooke: Pamphlet

Poppy: -wonderful little book to thank me for going to that other different level of membership.

Brooke: It's the post-election essay that I wrote for people who felt particular anguish at the result. More than the anguish that you would feel if somebody was elected that you didn't like. This seemed to go deeper and-

Poppy: Into shock.

Brooke: -I was asked to examine what is the source of that primal screen emanating from the coasts and other large cities in the US.

Poppy: Exactly. Primal screen, that's a color that I'm definitely going to have to-- It's on my list to do one-day, primal screen. I went off to have breakfast and I took it with me and I must say I'm one of those people that was in, not so much in shock about who got elected or who won, but more in shock that we've got here. Yours was the first thing that was really just about what's the underlying things that are going on here and what can we learn. When I started reading your book, I really wasn't thinking of anything to do with lipstick at that point. I'm just sitting in-- Having my eggs, reading as.

I remember asking the waitress can excuse me, can I get a pen? Instead of underlining things. Then when I came to-- When reality is personal, look it's got stars all around that. Then that quote reality is that which when you stop believing in it doesn't go away. When I started to really feel like, "My God, this is the experience of lipstick for me." Fake realities will create fake humans. Once that genie was out to the bottle, I couldn't stop seeing it. Then I got to the section about, how do you say it?

Brooke: The [unintelligible 00:10:56]

Poppy: The [unintelligible 00:10:56]

Brooke: That's the world we create for ourselves.

Poppy: Exactly and that is so much for me, the experience of lipstick. What I feel is that there is something about the act of wearing lipstick that is a very powerful act of being present for yourself in the world. Then it just occurred to me to get back in touch with the membership lady about whether or not one Madam Brooke Gladstone would be interested in actually collaborating with me on a lipstick. That's how we found each other to be sitting here.

Brooke: We're offering these lipsticks designed by Poppy King in collaboration with me for a donation of $12 a month. That's $144 for a year's support of this show so go to onthe media.org/donate or text lipstick to 70101 and thanks.

[00:12:04] [END OF AUDIO]

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