Introducing Horror Nation?, a latest season from Dazed concerning the current state of the UK from the attitude of the young individuals who live here. 

“That is the Beyoncé of all clear glosses,” influencer Nella Rose says as she holds up her NK Lip Gel in a TikTok video sharing her make-up kit staples. “I can’t live without the £1 hair shop lip gloss”. 

When I feel back to my childhood days, what stands out most of all – except for the high ponytailed braids, the rolled-up school skirts and the scuffed-up Kickers – are the lips so copiously slathered with thick layers of gloss. Now, this wasn’t just any old gloss. This was the NK Lip Gel, aka the Black girl staple. Coming courtesy of local hair shop Pak’s, it was its own cultural currency – a mere glance on the tube alone was enough to cause social disruption in the varsity playground.

Beyond the tinted chapsticks and Vaseline, lip gloss has at all times been a universal staple of girlhood. From the late 90s and early 00s, the industry, with all its fruity flavourings and brightly colored packaging, made its goal market clear. Lip glosses may very well be found in every single place, and – like many – the primary I ever bought was this 99p holy grail.

“Growing up, we wasn’t allowed to wear make-up at school… this was the make-up baby, you simply placed on your little lip gloss and also you was the Beyoncé,” Rose says within the video. Imaan Brown, 22, agrees. “I feel it could be very difficult to search out a Black British girl whose first lip gloss wasn’t one among the low cost ones from the hair shop,” she says.

Lip gloss’s inextricable bond to teenage girlhood has been reaffirmed repeatedly in popular culture and media, with songs like Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” and the lacquered-up lips of 90s Disney channel icons, similar to London Tipton and Raven Baxter. Yet, while white girls bought Girl Talk magazine and headed to Claire’s in droves, Black and Brown girls often didn’t see themselves represented in these spaces.

“As a young Black girl, nothing was created with me in mind,” Natalie A Carter writes in her book Grown: The Black Girls’ Guide to Glowing Up. “I couldn’t read a book at college that handled my experience or culture, or pick up a magazine with a free lipstick that will suit my complexion.” This is clearly an issue because, as feminist author Andrea Dworkin said in her 1974 book Women Hating, the “standards of beauty describe in precise terms the connection that a person may have to her own body”. 

For therefore long, make-up brands didn’t offer lipsticks or glosses in shades that suited darker skin tones, so women within the Black and Latinx community could only use clear gloss. With Western beauty standards denying us access to universal markers of femininity and girlhood, we had no selection but to make our own, with many resorting to using eyeliners and eyebrow pencils as a substitute of lip liners, topped with a slick of gloss to create a nude lip color. 

However the 99p gloss isn’t just an entry-level product inside Britain’s Black and Brown community. It’s a cultural heirloom. “I remember seeing other girls wearing the lip gloss and wanting to be an element of this community of young women embracing their gentle introductions to Black beauty,” Valerie Kporye, 21, tells Dazed. “It symbolised young Black girl culture, [and was a] statement of agency [for] young woman, without the pressure of growing up too quickly.” 

So, while the industry churned out a slew of white-casting glosses and poorly pigmented lipsticks in tepid rosy pinks, we found belonging on the checkout of our local hair shops, for lower than a pound. “I feel it’s the identical form of universal experience of girlhood that dress-up tiaras and Princess jewellery falls into,” says Brown. For a lot of, that 99p lip gloss was our saving grace, and an entry point in multiple ways: it granted financial access to make-up, but additionally social access to the narratives of girlhood (at the least amongst ourselves).

We’ve come a great distance from the 99p NK Lip Gel. Now we exist in a latest age of gloss, with products similar to Fenty Glass Bomb and Kiko 3D Hydra Lip Gloss taking the industry by storm, and granting us something loads of British Black women have been denied in the case of cosmetics: selection. There at the moment are finally shades we are able to wear, which actually suit our skin tones.

Despite all the brand new options, nonetheless, there remains to be something special concerning the OG. “Even to at the present time I still buy [the NK Lip Gel] each time I am going to the hair shop,” adds Brown. “Perhaps it’s due to nostalgia, but I keep reaching for them each time I would like a gloss – and so they have yet to let me down.”

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