If you’ve been flicking through the overseas magazines lately (which I’m finding tricky: my sea salt spray leaked all over $60 worth of mags yesterday: devastated), you’ll have noticed a lot of black going on. As in, the usual inky frocks and jet nails (yes, they’re baaack) and smoky eyes, but also, somewhat scarily, licorice lips. Yves Saint Laurent showed the black-lipped look (complete with matching bowl cuts) on the autumn/winter 08/09 catwalk – you can now buy the get-the-look gloss overseas, while Lancôme is also selling a black shimmery lip shine.

In this hemisphere, however, I’m not sure black lips are going to take off. YSL decided not to bring out its black gloss here, for instance. Sure, we’re coming into summer, which is so much more suited to pretty pastels and burnished shades of bronze. But I just don’t think Australia would get into black lips even in Winter. You can’t just add black lips and go. Everything has to revolve around black lips… the pale skin, the sharp dark hair, the fierce clothes, the stompy shoes. And Aussies are generally a bit too lazy, I mean casual, to go to all that effort. Perhaps, just perhaps, I could see a set of black lips making their way down Melbourne’s Brunswick Street. Or lurking down some dark laneway on the way to some gothic dive. Or on a Veronica (What’s going on with those girls’ lips, by the way, they’re humungous – or is it because their bodies are just getting smaller?).

Maybe I’m just wishful-thinking the trend away. I could, of course, be proven so very wrong - like I was about the comeback of short hair. But for any of you out there contemplating the look for the coming months, I just have this argument for the negative team: black is the most slimming colour you can get. Which is great for the hips. But quite another thing altogether for the lips.

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