There’s a quiet rule operating in boardrooms, interview panels and high-stakes meetings that no one will ever say to your face. This unwritten rule has nothing to do with your qualifications, your track record, or how well you’ve prepared, but has everything to do with your make-up and in this instance your lipstick.
Specifically, the shade and the finish of it. If that sounds absurdly trivial to you, stay with me, because the research says otherwise, and so does my own experience.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: if you’ve got a senior level interview, an important meeting, or you’re walking into a room where you need to be taken seriously, the ultra-gloss and very bright statement shades are potentially working against you.
For those moments, you want muted tones, nudes and a matte or satin finish.
I know the current trend is that matte is over. Nevertheless, if you’re newer to these environments, or you’re not yet established in your ranking, your lipstick needs to be matte to the heavens when you have something important going on.
This isn’t a beauty trend conversation. It’s a credibility one, and before you decide that this is about policing women, please carry on reading, because that's the exact narrative I want to dismantle.
Let me tell you what this is really about
Every time I raise this topic, the same response rolls in. “Why are you telling women what to wear or how to look?” “Who appointed you the style police?”
So let me be clear, I’m not policing anyone. I’m a firm believer in women expressing themselves freely, fully and unapologetically. If anything, I want more of that, not less.
However, this whole conversation is part of something much bigger, a topic people often pretend doesn’t exist but is there playing in the background of many fields, particularly high end corporate. This led me to starting a series “Nobody’s Going To Tell You. So I Will” on my social media platforms, because nobody else would say it out loud, and there are so many women oblivious to these facts.
The premise is simple: there’s a time and a place for everything, and in certain settings there are unwritten rules. Rules that aren’t printed anywhere, that no one will ever explain to you, but that you’re somehow expected to already know.
The penalty for not knowing them is quiet, and brutal (been there done that, got the badge). You won’t get told, you just don’t get the role, the deal or the seat and they’ll simply move on to the next person.
I need you to understand that this isn’t theory for me, I’ve been exactly where many of the women I see today are. I’ve stood in those rooms feeling sure of my talent and quietly wondering why the recognition wasn’t matching the effort.
So, when I say “this is what you need to do,” I’m not lecturing you from some untouchable pedestal. I’m reaching back and saying, here’s the quicker, less painful and ethical way to get ahead. I learned some of this the hard way so that you don’t have to.
Honestly, there’s some days where I feel a bit like Moses, who went to his own people to help them, and they turned round and said, “Who made you ruler and judge over us?”. I’m standing here saying, “you told me you want to climb the corporate ladder, gain influence and make more money, I’m telling you exactly what it takes to get there and you would rather argue with me the messenger”?
And to some extent, I get it, because that was previously me. That’s why I’m so adamant on constantly banging this drum, in the hope that maybe one or two women will eventually listen.
So, let’s get into why this rule exists, because it’s not me being dramatic. It’s science.
Your face speaks before your mouth opens
Here’s the part most people genuinely don’t realise. By the time you’ve said “good morning,” a verdict has already been reached about you. Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov ran a now famous set of experiments on this. They showed people photographs of unfamiliar faces for just 100 milliseconds (a tenth of a second), and asked them to rate traits like competence, trustworthiness and likability.
All it took was a tenth of a second to form an impression of a stranger from their face, and longer exposures didn’t significantly alter those impressions. Of all the traits, the strongest, fastest judgment was trustworthiness.
Sit with that for a second.
That’s basically saying that before you’ve shaken a hand or delivered a single line of your beautifully rehearsed pitch, the room has already decided whether it trusts you and whether it thinks you’re competent.
These are fast, intuitive, unreflective judgments, and crucially, the people making them often don’t even consciously realise they’re doing it.
That’s the bit that makes it so unfair, yet so important. Nobody in that boardroom is sitting there thinking, “I’ve decided she’s frivolous because of her lip gloss.” It’s happening underneath conscious thought. Which means you can’t argue your way out of it after the event, you can only manage it before you walk in.
What the makeup science actually shows
Now, this is where it gets nuanced, and I want to paint a full fair picture, because some of you would have read that makeup makes women seem more competent, not less. And you’d be right. Well sort of. It just depends on the type of makeup.
You see, a study led by Dr Nancy Etcoff of Harvard, looked at this point. Researchers showed participants pics of women wearing no makeup, and then in three different looks: natural, professional and glamorous. When the faces were flashed up for 250 of a milliseconds, every makeup look increased ratings of attractiveness, competence, likability and trust compared to the bare face.
So far, so good for team makeup. However, here’s the line everyone conveniently skips. The study also revealed that positive perception decreased as women applied heavier brighter makeup. When people were given unlimited time to study the faces, it was the natural and professional looks that held onto those competence and trust ratings. The glamorous look didn’t carry the same weight under sustained scrutiny.
And that’s where I’m going with all of this. A boardroom or panel interview is not a 250-millisecond glance. It’s an hour of sustained scrutiny. It’s the exact condition under which the bolder, more dramatic look starts to lose you points on the things that actually matter for the job: competence, trustworthiness etc.
There’s a reason for this beyond pure bias. Bold, ultra-glossy, highly shiny lips do something specific to the human eye, they draw it. Gloss reflects light and creates movement, and movement attracts attention.
In a setting where you need every ounce of their focus on your words, your strategy, your numbers, you don’t want a competing focal point sitting in the middle of your face.
I say it all the time: whatever distracts, detracts.
Why this lands harder for us
I want to speak directly to professional women for a moment, because we’re not playing on a level field, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
The research is clear that a woman’s appearance is read and judged in ways a man's simply isn’t. We’re scrutinised more and the margin for “getting it wrong” is thinner.
A man can roll out of bed, throw on a basic suit, and still be assumed competent until proven otherwise.
We on the other hand, are often assumed to be decorative until proven serious.
That’s unjust. I’m not going to dress it up as anything else, but I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you walk into a high stakes room and learn that lesson the expensive way, after the opportunity has already slipped past.
In addition to everything I’ve just said, I want to speak even more candidly to my black women, because the bitter pill to swallow is that we’re often judged even harsher than our white counterparts.
Layer on the additional bias many of us face before we’ve even said a word, and the stakes of every small signal goes up.
The same boldness that reads as confident on one woman gets read as aggressive on us. The same flair that’s called creative on someone else gets called unprofessional on us. We’re working from a starting line that’s been quietly moved back, and we feel it in rooms long before anyone says a word.
Take the whole hair conversation (I know i’m deviating from the topic of lips to hairs, but stay with me because it’s all connected). For years, and still in some places today, afro hair and natural styles were treated as unruly, untidy, even unprofessional, as though the way our hair grows out of our own heads was somehow a problem to be managed.
That perception is slowly shifting, and the reason it’s shifting is because of representation. The more we see ourselves at the top, the more the old assumptions lose their grip. However, notice where that change is actually coming from. It predominantly comes from women who are already at the top of their game. That’s when it most effectively lands, because they’ve already established the rapport, reputation and standing and so whatever they now do, moves the needle.
A woman who has earned her seat can wear her hair exactly as she pleases, and the room adjusts to her rather than the other way round. That’s exactly why I keep saying: get in the door, work your way up, and then you’re in a much better position to implement change and influence perceptions.
Although a fictional character, I often think of Judge Regina Turner in the Netflix series The Lincoln Lawyer, and how elated I was to see the way she was portrayed in the last series; someone who looks nothing like what we’ve been conditioned to expect a judge to look like.
Representation like that, chips away at the stereotype every time it shows up. However, it hits harder and holds more gravitas because of the position that woman held.
Everything from her hair, the nose ring, lipstick shade and colour, all scream ‘Not On A Judge’, ‘Not Professional Enough’, but that’s partly why her representation was more effective. She had reached the highly established and accomplished status of a judge, so nobody was going to question why she looked the way she did.
Plus, I always come back to what Michelle Obama said about how she had to carry/ present herself whilst in The White House. She had to wear her hair straight or blown-out to avoid political distractions and protect the agenda, because she didn’t want people focused on/ spark debates about her hair rather than what was important.
I’m using this example of hair, to emphasis the point that a lot of black women in these sorts of industries (politics, corporate etc), often have to choose to comply with the ‘unwritten rules’, until they get ahead, and then not have to. That’s just the reality of what we face, even in 2026.
Nowadays, Mrs Obama wears her hair however she wants, and nobody can say a thing about it, but that freedom came after she’d reached the top, not before.
Again, generally it’s not until you’ve reached a certain level, that your representation carries real weight and you become most effective at making change.
So for us, working smarter isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole strategy (food for thought).
Playing smart is not playing small
Let me be really clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not telling you to dim your light, shrink yourself, or become beige to make other people comfortable. That’s not it.
What I’m telling you is to read the room you’re in, in that specific moment, and choose accordingly. A muted, matte lip in a panel interview isn’t you disappearing. It’s you removing every possible reason for someone to underestimate you. It finishes the face and reads as composed, intentional and serious. It doesn’t compete with your authority, it supports it.
And I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t always receive this gracefully. When you start telling someone how to adjust their appearance, you’re touching something tender, and for me it was more tender than most. If you’ve followed my story, you’ll know I carried real trigger points around my physical appearance, rooted in past trauma.
So early on, being told to change anything about how I presented myself didn’t feel like advice, it felt like an attack, as it pricked at old wounds.
What changed everything was a handful of good mentors. People who loved me enough to be honest, who helped me work through that fragility instead of tiptoeing around it, and who helped me see things for what they actually are rather than what my hurt was telling me they were. That kind of honesty is rare, because most people would rather stay politically correct and keep things comfortable than risk stepping on your toes.
I thank God for the ones who cared more about my growth than my comfort, because they’re the reason I moved up to higher levels and this is partly why I want to do the same for the women I see trying to build their careers.
One thing my mentor said to me that has never left me, and I’m hearing it echoed more and more these days, especially on social media is, “The Lord looks at the heart, but people look at and judge by the outward appearance. So, if you’re going to function in a world full of people, you’d better know that they’re assessing and judging you by how you look.”
That reframed it entirely for me. It’s not vanity to care about how you present yourself, it’s wisdom and some of the great figures we still talk about today understood this principle deeply.
Esther didn’t walk into the king’s court by accident; she prepared, she understood the assignment and presented with intention. Joseph changed his clothes before he stood in front of Pharaoh, because he understood that the room he was entering had its own code.
These weren’t shallow people. They were strategic.
So, here’s the decision you now have to make: Are you willing to forfeit the role, the bag and the genuine influence you could have had in that space, simply because you want to prove a point to people who, quite frankly, couldn’t care less and would’ve moved on to the next candidate before you reached the lift?
Because here’s the truth about how the game works, you have to be established and have reached a certain level before people stop scrutinising what’s on your lips and start respecting you regardless of it.
Once you’re there, you get to rewrite the rules and be the one who walks in glossed up and unbothered, and even change how things are done for the women coming up behind you.
That’s the goal and I want you to get there.
But until you do, and as harsh as it may sound, there’s rules to this game, and you either play them or you step aside and let someone else take the seat.
Forget what you see on TV or what your favourite influencer does and definitely don’t compare yourself to the one woman who breaks every rule and gets away with it, because she’s the exception, not the rule.
In a nutshell, in these rooms, perception is everything and your lipstick, its shade and its texture, matters more than anyone is willing to tell you.
Although i’m optimistic that things will eventually change for us as women, until it does, on the days where it matters, please leave the gloss at home, because it really isn’t worth it.
A word before I let you go
My platform has always stood on three pillars: to Encourage, Educate, and Empower women. And what I’ve had to come to terms with is that doing the three things will inevitably cause friction for some.
There’ll always be people who would rather not be told anything, who hear “here’s how to win” as “here’s what’s wrong with you.” I understand that more than they know, because as previously stated, I was once one of them.
Nevertheless, I’m going to keep doing this anyway, because the alternative is watching brilliant women lose rooms, they’re more than qualified to own, over something as petty and fixable as this. You can disagree with me, and you’re welcome to take it up with social science while you’re at it, but always remember: nobody was going to tell you this. So I did.
Share this with a woman who’s about to walk into a room that matters. Because the women who rise fastest are the ones who learn the rules before they need them.
With love,
Antoinette
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I’m your unconventional certified Intl Protocol & Etiquette Consultant, advising High-Level Professionals across various fields/ industries.
From boardrooms, Michelin tables to elite social circles, I’ll show you how to confidently move through every room with ease.
So If you want the polish without the pomp and pretension, with a sprinkle of lifestyle content, follow for more. Instagram: @Tconfidentwoman
