Women like herself rarely wore red lipstick, not only because a woman who wore it called attention to her face—carved with lines by a life of working long hours—but because red lipstick required the wearer to be vigilant about where they placed their hands on themselves, so as not to mess up or smudge their mouths, vigilant about the lining of their lips so that the color wouldn’t bleed into the tiny cracks that formed as time went by, as they had on both Mina’s and Mrs. Baek’s. But
