This was published 9 months ago
Poppy King was more than a lipstick queen. She challenged ideas of beauty
By Bunny Banyai
To the best of my knowledge, at 13 years old I was the object of no one’s crush. As I saw it, my face was the problem: better suited to the dark corners of the library than the beaches of Bondi. I was wincingly aware that none of the beautiful people looked like me: not on Neighbours, not within the pages of Dolly and Cleo – which I read as though they were religious texts – and certainly not in the school yard.
“At a time when the Australian ideal of beauty was limited to variations on ‘beach babe’, Poppy introduced me to a different way to be beautiful.” Credit: Stocksy
As I lurched into adolescence, classmates began to comment on my “moon face” and “slanty eyes”. No amount of make-up could turn me into a girl-next-door type; my Slav DNA was pancaked all over my face. With August-pale skin and a preternaturally sad face, I could have convincingly portrayed a character in a Chekhov play, but this was not a particularly potent form of social currency at my school.
What I really wanted to look like was a Dolly model, but the only way I was going to be entered into their famed modelling contest – the secret aspiration of every Australian teenage girl, circa 1990 – was if someone did it as a mean joke. The highest form of praise I ever received was that mine was an “old-fashioned” and “unusual” face. Carnal attention came only in the form of the occasional elderly pervert patting my thigh on the train.
Salvation came in the form of an 18-year-old entrepreneur. To you, she is Poppy King, who, while still a teenager, launched her range of matte lipsticks, the Seven Deadly Sins, to the instant rapt attention of the world. To me, she’s the fairy godmother who helped me see who I could be, where previously I only saw everything I couldn’t be.
At a time when the Australian ideal of beauty was limited to variations on “beach babe”, Poppy introduced me to a different way to be beautiful. She had a perfect sheet of thick blonde hair, pillowy red lips and baby-doll saucer eyes, but she was also something very recognisable to me: a pale European.
Applying a matte red lipstick for the first time: that was transformative. A window into a world where I might actually like my appearance opened up.
I knew immediately that I’d found my beauty role model. My mum bought me my first Poppy lipstick at David Jones, and it is no exaggeration to say that taking possession of that black and gold tube, with the distinctive kiss impression on the lid, was the defining moment of my youth.
Losing my virginity did not come close; that was an unavoidable rite of passage, something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible to avoid the dreaded spectre of graduating from high school a virgin. Applying a matte red lipstick for the first time: that was transformative. Suddenly, a window into a world where I might actually like my appearance opened up.
Buying that first tube of Poppy lipstick felt like investing in a future version of myself. I was rarely bold enough to wear it out – at 13, living on the outskirts of Melbourne, my social life was comprised exclusively of parties in paddocks – but I knew that someday my life would catch up to my lipstick.
I would take it out of my toiletries bag under the bathroom sink and layer it on liberally, staring at this new version of myself in awe and wonder.
School was horrible. I was insecure well beyond the normal range, paralysed with self-consciousness, and I occupied the most lonely of social spheres: adjacent to, but not actually in, the popular group. With one swipe of Poppy lipstick, I could transport myself into a future where I was not a scared weirdo with a mouth full of metal, but a Confident Woman Doing Something Exciting in the City.
Poppy and her lipsticks presented me with an ideal of beauty that was not only realistic for someone with my features, but also one that appealed to who I was inside. Her aesthetic spoke of mercurial femmes fatales, of glamour and tragedy and grit and depth. I was not a regular kid; my primary fixations were spontaneous human combustion, earthquakes and old movie stars. I thought about death constantly, pining for the little sister who died at only a few weeks of age, convinced that, like her, I would die from a heart issue. The Dolly models looked carefree and unburdened. They not only didn’t look like me, they didn’t act like me.
But Poppy was pale and interesting – just like Mum told me I was, in her efforts to make me feel better – and she was gorgeous. Poppy looked like the old movie stars I loved so much. But until she came along, I had not understood that these women, and not just the winsome girls-next-door of teen magazines, could also provide a template for the grown-up woman I was trying to construct.
I wish I’d spent less time hating my face. As I watch my own 15-year-old grappling with the less Barbie-like features of her beautiful face, I hope she finds her own Poppy King, someone who makes her realise she doesn’t need to throw all her McJob money and psychic energy into trying to look like someone else. That accepting what you look like and working with what you’ve got leaves a lot more time to dive headlong into the things that feed, rather than starve, your spirit.
I still wear matte red lipstick every day. Even when masks were mandatory indoors and out, I always wore lipstick underneath. It didn’t matter that no one would see it, or that it would bleed all over the inside of the mask. It made me feel better, keeping up this ritual, knowing that the face under the mask was the same as it was pre-pandemic, even if everything else had changed.
As I enter middle age, I wear less and less make-up. Foundation makes me feel like a cracked terracotta pot. Mascara balls up in the corner of my eyes, like tiny expensive rat droppings. Eyeshadow will settle anywhere on my face except my eyelids. But lipstick I will never, ever renounce. Lipstick makes me look like me.
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