Drugged Lipstick

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

—Jayne, Firefly

A character (naturally, usually a woman) wears lipstick with some sort of drug or poison in it, with the result that anyone who kisses her is affected by it. Only very rarely is it explained why the wearer of the lipstick is immune.

Compare Kiss of Death, Post-Kiss Catatonia.

Examples of Drugged Lipstick include:

Anime and Manga

• 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 figured this out pretty quickly.

Comic Books

• This was a favorite tactic of Poison Ivy in her early appearances in the Batman comics. Gradually she gained the ability to generate poisons in her body, negating the need for the drugged lipstick.

Fan Fiction

• 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.

Film

• The Les Yay Hong Kong action movie Naked Killer (1992): Poisoned lipstick is used on a couple of occasions.
• 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 and 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.

Literature

• Worn by Sabetha in The Republic of Thieves. Locke falls to the trap like a chump. To be fair, he and Sabetha used to be lovers.

Live Action TV

• River Song uses hallucinogenic lipstick in the Doctor Who episode "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 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.)
• 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). Simon, the ship's doctor, explains that the drug is spread on a "seal on the lips" and that he frequently dealt with unconscious men being brought in on the night shift who had been drugged and robbed.
• This happens in an episode of Lois and Clark with kryptonite lipstick.
• 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.
• 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.
• Angel of Death from the TV series Black Scorpion uses poison lipstick as a weapon.
• In Arrested Development, GOB puts ether on the lips of his ventriloquist dummy, Franklin, and knocks people out by having Franklin kiss them.
• 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.
• The Charmed 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.
• 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

Web Comics

• In Dangerously Chloe Pandora Rapture uses some "special" lipsticks, including paralysis version.

Western Animation

• In her earliest appearances in Batman the Animated Series, 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.