In the 1940s, lipstick tended to fade and smear. Women were constantly checking their teeth for red marks and repainting their mouths. Hazel Bishop — a biochemist with a background in petroleum science — set out to solve this problem. Using the tiny kitchen of her Central Park West apartment as a lab, she cooked potions in a double boiler and compounded dyes on a countertop. Sometimes so much dust escaped from her experiments that the butter in her refrigerator turned red. Lipstick had existed for centuries, of course, but Bishop hoped to create a long-lasting version for the modern woman, one that would stand up to the friction of coffee cups, cigarettes and kisses. She hit on a formula made with lanolin and dyes that penetrated deep into the skin. To demonstrate its sticking power, she persuaded her neighborhood druggist to decorate his hand with streaks of her lipstick. As he rang up purchases, the red stripes stayed bright.

Soon Bishop turned to an adman named Raymond Spector to help her mount a national campaign; lacking capital, she paid him in shares. By the mid-1950s, Hazel Bishop Inc. held a quarter of the lipstick market, even as competitors introduced their own “kissproof” formulas. The words “Hazel Bishop” became synonymous with a product designed from a woman’s point of view — comfortable to wear and dependable. But Spector eventually acquired most of the company’s stock and took ownership of Hazel Bishop Inc. Forced out of the company that she founded, Bishop went on to reinvent herself as a financial analyst. “There was nothing feminine about the cosmetics business,” she told a reporter in 1978. “It was a man’s world from beginning to end.”

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Lipstick Kitchen

Randa Bishop recalls visiting her aunt in the Central Park West apartment where she made lipstick.