Drugged Lipstick

"That's why I never kiss 'em on the mouth."

— Jayne Cobb, Firefly

A character — usually a woman, often The Vamp — wears lipstick with some sort of drug or poison in it, with the result that anyone who kisses her is affected by it. As for why the wearer herself isn't harmed, it may be explained that she is either naturally immune or took the antidote beforehand.

Compare Mouth To Mouth Force Feeding, Kiss of Death, Post-Kiss Catatonia, Clean Food, Poisoned Fork.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• There's a variation in Bloody Cross where Hinata uses his tongue to apply a spell to knock Tsukimiya out under the guise of examining the intimate location of her curse mark.
• In Samurai Champloo, a woman called Hotaru is revealed to be an assassin who uses a special kind of lipstick that becomes toxic when mixed with alcohol. Luckily Mugen figures this out pretty quickly.

Audio Plays

• Just as in the show, this is a favorite trick of River Song in Big Finish Doctor Who. It is to the point where it gets lampshaded in an episode of The Lives of Captain Jack.
  River: (sing-song) Toxic lipstick~...
  Jack: (slurred) Oh, not again! YOU HAVE GOT TO STOP POISONING ME!!!
  River: (smugly) No.

Comic Books

• ABC Warriors: Morrigun also uses this to kill at least one human. Being a robot helps a lot when dealing with poisons that turn humans into plants.
• Doctor Who Magazine: In "The Broken Man", Amy Pond escapes from an MI6 agent by kissing him with a drugged lipstick (implied to be a gift from River Song).
• The Maze Agency: In one story, after a man is mysteriously poisoned, one suspect accuses the victim's wife of killing him with poisoned lipstick. Jennifer points out that any poison that potent and fast-working would have killed the wife as well.
• In The Punisher, a vigilante called Raving Beauty used poisoned lipstick to kill the men who had wronged her and forced her into drugs and prostitution.
• In The Spirit, the Black Widow used poisoned lipstick. She put it on top of a layer of ordinary lipstick to avoid its effects.
• The DCU
  • Batman:
    • This was a favorite tactic of Poison Ivy in her early appearances in the comics. Gradually she gained the ability to generate poisons in her body, negating the need for the drugged lipstick.
    • Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: The Joker uses lipsticks with a variety of effects. One type essentially hypnotizes the people he kisses; he uses this to put Selina Kyle and at least two of her call girls under his control, with the call girls then using it to mind-control people into trying to kill themselves. Another is laced with Joker venom, which he uses to kill Dr. Ruth Weisenheimer on-stage during his appearance on The David Endochrine Show.
  • In the Superman storyline Critical Condition, La Encantadora infected the Man of Steel with a form of Kryptonite-like cancer by kissing him with drugged lipstick provided by the second General Zod. However, since La Encantadora mostly sees herself as a non-violent con artist, she repents and quietly helps them find a cure.
  • Teen Titans rogue Cheshire is a Femme Fatale Master Poisoner, so unsurprisingly she sometimes keeps her lipstick poisoned. In one instance in Secret Six she lured one man into a false sense of security by kissing him... and then bit off a man's lower lip, and then he started foaming at the mouth before he died, implying that she's internalized a number of poisons.

Fan Works

• In Future Shock, this is attempted by Poison Ivy, naturally, as well as by Harley Quinn.
• In a Heat Guy J Yaoi fanfic called In A Different Light, there is a mention of a fantasy club-drug called Black Tab being mixed into lipstick and eyeliner, so that the wearer can absorb them into his/her skin and get high without, say, getting caught with a bag of pills.
• Appears in With This Ring, where the main character finds it ridiculous. Ridiculous enough that he doesn't expect a professional killer like Cheshire to be wearing any when she offers him a kiss as a reward for capturing her father. His Power Ring prevents him from dying from it, but he ends up loopy until Miss Martian is able to get him to purge the poison, at which point he learns his lesson.

Films — Live-Action

• In the spy flick The Ambushers, a beautiful enemy agent offers hero Matt Helm a drink of whiskey. After he declines, she takes a drink herself, puts on lipstick, and starts kissing him. The lipstick is poisoned, and the whiskey is the antidote!
• Poison Ivy in Batman & Robin actually has poisonous lips, and kills the mad doctor inadvertently responsible for her creation with a kiss. She tries to do the same to Robin later, but the rubber lips he's wearing protect him.
• Holes has a variant; the Warden's nail polish has rattlesnake venom in it, which she assures someone she scratches is perfectly harmless - when dry. In a case of either Blatant Lies or Artistic License – Biology once the nail polish dries, all of the venom that would be left are the deadly toxins.
• Poisoned lipstick is used on a couple of occasions in Naked Killer.
• In La Reine Margot, the resident Master Poisoner gives Henri of Navarre's lover some poisoned lipstick. An unusual example in that this does in fact kill the woman wearing it; she is an Unwitting Pawn and was deemed expendable as long as she inadvertently kills her target. She fails, the poison is too fast-acting and it kills her before she gets a chance to use it on him.

Literature

• Flora Segunda mixes sleeping powder into her lip rouge to take down Springheeled Jack.

Live-Action TV

• In 666 Park Avenue, Olivia Doran puts on poisoned lip gloss and kisses her husband's enemy, Frank Alpern, who immediately collapses.
• In Agent Carter, Peggy uses her 102 SWEET DREAMS lipstick tube to knock out a black market dealer/nightclub owner. A female assassin later steals it to use on Peggy.
• In Arrested Development, GOB puts ether on the lips of his ventriloquist dummy, Franklin, and knocks people out by having Franklin kiss them.
• Angel of Death from the TV series Black Scorpion uses poison lipstick as a weapon.
• The Charmed (1998) episode "Bride and Gloom" has a demon who steals the lipstick Prue was just wearing so he can cast a spell on it, making it so that when he kisses her with it she gets paralyzed and he can force her to marry him.
• Subverted in an episode of CSI where some prostitutes put sedative on their nipples so they can knock out clients and rob them. Unfortunately, it knocks them out too.
• Doctor Who: River Song uses hallucinogenic lipstick in "The Time of Angels", and again in "The Pandorica Opens" — twice. Finally, she uses it a fourth time on the Doctor himself in "Let's Kill Hitler". Except this time it's poisoned.
• In the Firefly episode "Our Mrs. Reynolds", Saffron wears lipstick with some kind of soporific property, which she uses to knock out Mal (and, indirectly, Inara). She intends to use it on Wash too but Seduction-Proof Marriage kicks in and he won’t cooperate and gets cold cocked instead. Simon, the ship's doctor, explains that he frequently dealt with unconscious men being brought in on the night shift who had been drugged and robbed.
  Simon: A narcotic compound, probably spread over a seal on her lips. You get it on yours and pow. We used to get a lotta guys brought in on the night shift at the E.R. — usually robbed, very groggy. They called it the "goodnight kiss".
• In a Sherlock Holmes spoof on The Flip Wilson Show, a seductive woman (played by Connie Stevens) kills her elderly husband by kissing him after touching up her lipstick—from a compact displaying a prominent skull-and-crossbones.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Princess Myrcella is given a goodbye kiss by Ellaria Sand. Unfortunately Ellaria's lips are coated with "The Long Farewell," a delayed-action poison which kills poor Myrcella a short time later. Ellaria takes the antidote just after the princess and Jaime leave.
  • In Season 7, Cersei returns the favor to Ellaria by kissing her daughter, Tyene, which the same poison used to kill Myrcella and forcing Ellaria to watch her daughter die and rot in chains. Like Ellaria's own example, Cersei quickly wipes the lipstick off after delivering the kiss and Qyburn hands her the antidote. This is doubly-ironic because Tyene herself is a master of poisons.
• At least a couple of times during the run of Get Smart: once a bad girl wears some and tries to kiss Max — luckily he has his lip protector on; and once 99 wears some and uses it to knock out (not kill) a bad guy who's about to kill her and Max (her Last Request is a Last Kiss… from the bad guy!). Surprisingly for the show, the KAOS girl is always shown to first apply a "protective undercoating" to her lips. Even more surprisingly for the show, she never mixes the two up.
• In the Gilligan's Island episode "The Invasion", Gilligan dreams that he's secret agent 014. During the dream, Ginger Grant's character wears poisoned lipstick, but 014 is prepared with lip guards.
• This happens in an episode of Lois & Clark with kryptonite lipstick.
• Murdoch Mysteries: In "Painted Ladies", the killer is a woman who wears lip rouge laced with cyanide (coating her own lips with wax to protect herself) and then seduces men into kissing her. As they do, she bites their lip: drawing blood and allowing the cyanide to enter their bloodstream. Both Murdoch and Julia remark that she is taking a huge risk using this as a means of assassination, even with the wax on her lips.
• Nikita. Nikita's lipstick contains peanut oil, which Victor Han is deathly allergic to. She manipulates him into kissing her, and he goes into anaphylactic shock.
• In an episode of No Ordinary Family, Jim loses his superpowers. It turns out that cynoxate, an ingredient in Stephanie's lip gloss, is the kryptonite to Jim's Applied Phlebotinum, the trilsettum coronis. She claims to have gotten rid of it, but apparently still has it lying around, because in a later episode, the evil shape-shifter Victoria turns into Stephanie and steals the lip gloss, neutralizing Jim's powers when she kisses him.
• In Smallville, Lois once had red kryptonite lipstick. Subverts the immune part, which would oddly be justified if played straight because red kryptonite is not supposed to affect humans.
• A rare male example appears in the Torchwood episode "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang". Jack tells Gwen not to let Captain John Hart kiss her; when he does, it turns out that it's because he wears paralyzing lipstick. Oddly enough, Jack himself seems to be immune, as Jack and John repeatedly engage in Slap-Slap-Kiss and Kiss-Kiss-Slap throughout the episode. (Though John did disappear right before he kissed Gwen, so he could have been putting it on then and could have taken it off afterward when he kissed Jack goodbye.)

Tabletop Games

• The bloody cochineal poison in the Lamentations of the Flame Princess module No Salvation for Witches. It at least addresses the immunity issue by specifying that the poison has no effect on women, somehow. (Presumably it's magic.)
• Warhammer Fantasy: Lucrezzia Belladonna once found herself the cause of a duel between a Tilean and a Bretonnian knight, the latter taking offense to the former declaring someone other than the Fey Enchantress the World's Most Beautiful Woman. The Tilean presented his lance to Lucrezzia so that she could tie a ribbon to it, but she just kissed the tip instead. The Bretonnian fell despite suffering Scratch Damage, and when asked if the lance was poisoned, Lucrezzia was quick to point out that it certainly wasn't, as she'd kissed it and suffered no ill effects.

Video Games

• In Baldur's Gate III, romancing the Token Evil Teammate Minthara can lead to a situation where after sharing a kiss with her, you suddenly suffer the effects of being poisoned. When confronted about this, she would reveal to you that she had laced her lips with toxins with the intent of helping you build up an immunity to poison.
• The flavor text for the Adder's Kiss poison in Dragon Age: Origins deconstructs this in the expected way.
  An Antivan noble killed his adulterous wife by coating his lips with this poison and kissing her. He died as well.
• In Fallen London, you can buy a kiss from Sinning Jenny during the Feast of the Exceptional Rose. Normally the kiss goes off without a hitch, but there's a rare possibility of Sinning Jenny turning out to be wearing poisoned lipstick that knocks you out because someone unknown paid her to harm you.
• Inverted in Hitman: Blood Money, when Diana gives Agent 47 the antidote to the poison she injected him with by kissing him on the lips at his funeral before leaving the church. When he wakes up, he proceeds to kill every single person there.

Western Animation

• Batman: The Animated Series:
  • In her earliest appearances, Poison Ivy is shown applying drugged lipstick to create her toxic kisses, something she uses against Harvey Dent and Batman in her first episode. Later episodes make the poisonous kisses natural, and show her creating doctored lipstick for Harley Quinn to use in order to cause the same effect. Whether this is a retcon or an implication that Ivy's powers evolved over time (a reasonable hypothesis, given other changes, like her skin color) is unknown, but as she does possess an antidote to her own poisons and was later shown giving Harley Quinn an injection for the same, it can be assumed that even in her earliest appearances she'd already treated herself to prevent from being poisoned.
  • There's "Holiday Knights" which was split in three parts. The first part dealt with Bruce Wayne being kissed by Harley Quinn, who, along with Poison Ivy, kidnapped him and made him spend a ridiculous amount of money on them. When the lipstick began wearing off, Harley tried to kiss him again.
• DuckTales: Feathers Galore in "Double-O-Duck". After figuring out Launchpad isn't Bruno, she tries to kill him by kissing him after applying poisoned lipstick. He gets away, of course.
• Johnny Bravo: In Bravo, James Bravo, Johnny asks for a kiss from agent Jane Bonded in exchange for keeping her agency a secret. Only after their lips meet does she remember that she had set the high-tech lipstick for "malaria", and collapses.
• Miraculous Ladybug: Although it's technically magic rather than poison, Zombizou's superpower is a zombie infection spread through kissing. Her lipstick is even the akumatized object that needs to be purified to remove said power from her.

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