Carmine is present in almost all red coloured lipsticks that aren’t made using natural organic ingredients and natural organic processes. Scarlet in colour, it is the ingredient that gives dark shaded lipsticks that deep, soulful hue, to which many women and men are so attracted; it gives the deep set red that many of us, for various Freudian and pseudo-Freudian reasons - including the colour similarities with other desires and closely connected parts of the human body - has been worshipped almost in fetish for centuries, though certainly exploding in the last century.

Like any compound, Carmine is made up of a number of elements, but it is Cochineal, which is the offending ingredient, that has caused Carmine so many problems in natural organic beauty circles. Cochineal, which sounds as much like a synthesised chemical as anything else, is in fact a species of insect, found most often in South America and parts of Mexico.

So that very beautiful and oft canonised sweet red hue on our lips is in fact stained and tainted with death. As it is in their interest to suppress such information, most unethical beauty companies present cochineal simply as a code: CI 75470. That way, or so the argument goes, people need never know the true nature of their beauty products, and people will continue to buy products that aren’t as ethical as they are often made out to be.

And the striking thing about this mystically named CI 75470 is that it is also sexist: only female Cochineal insects are used to create Carmine, so that every woman who uses carmine dyed lipstick is in many ways denying their own emancipation.

So it is clear that Carmine goes against the coda of the natural organic skincare brands, who believe wholeheartedly in maintenance of the planet’s eco systems in the creation of beauty products. And, in their pursuit of profit, the unethical beauty companies are destroying the Cochineal species, a peace loving, family orientated insect, that never did harm to anyone, not least the beauty companies, who have mercilessly enslaved the insect.

So, in thinking about the origins of our beauty products and potential switches to natural organic beauty products, we should take time to think of the poor Cochineal insect, flying potentially freely through the winds of South America, knowing not of the net that awaits it.

By switching to natural organic beauty products, we might end this tyranny; we might show the fly the way out of the bottle, both literally, and in reference to our own consumer habits.

Please, spare a thought for the beautiful Cochineal, the victim of consumerism and the large beauty companies, and switch to natural organic beauty products; beauty products that have found natural organic alternatives to the evil genocide of the female Cochineal, and are flying the flag for maintenace of ecosystems across the world, as indeed, they should.

And next time we apply lipstick containing CI 75470, let’s think about the implications of that on South Americans and Mexicans, who are losing one of their native insects.