Hugh Hefner was a proponent of many things that caused controversy, but there was one unusual thing he didn’t support. The late Playboy founder reportedly banned models from wearing red lipstick. Hefner’s surprising quirk was shared by Holly Madison —a Playboy model who was also one of Hefner’s girlfriends — on the Apple podcast Ahead Of The Curve with Coco Mocoe.
“He felt like he had the leeway to yell at me over it,” she shared, explaining just how much Hefner did not like red lipstick. She went on to share that it was some time before she realized that was averse to the makeup shade. “I think it was a control tactic, but also, when I was brand new, I wore red lipstick out a couple of times, and he didn’t say anything about it, because when you were the new girl in the group, you were always treated well.”
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Madison continued, “Somebody said, like, the higher up you are in a cult the worse you’re treated because they want the new people to want to bond and feel into it. So I would wear red lipstick when I was new.” She later shared, “It wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t a big deal until, like, six months into it, when I was living in his bedroom, and I was the main girlfriend, then he felt like he had the leeway to yell at me over it.”
The former Girls Next Door star — who dated Hefner at the same time as her reality TV show co-stars Bridget Marquardt and Kendra Wilkinson — also offered what she belives was Hefner’s reasoning behind not liking red lipstick. “I think he didn’t love it, because when he invented the concept of a Playmate in the ’50s, he wanted the women to look very young and fresh-faced,” she said, “because he felt like the look in the ’50s at the time was very… He described it as ‘somebody’s older sister.’ It was very more sophisticated, fashion model, red lipstick.”
Madison added, “It was a lot of fabric and big skirts and everything, and he hated that. He wanted skimpy and fresh-faced and very young looking. So I think that’s where his hatred of red lipstick came from [because] to him, that was an older mature woman.” She concluded, “And it wasn’t, like, the barely legal thing anymore.”
