Give it a Whirl!

People stop me in the street when I'm wearing Whirl. Someone will catch my eye on the Tube, or pause me mid-stride, to ask what's on my lips. I will always tell them what it is, I don't gatekeep, but then, if given the opportunity, I add a little embellishment. I say that Whirl, by MAC, has a cult following among London artists.

This is somewhat true. Whirl is a shade that my friends are devoted to. It has a cult following among my immediate friends, with whom I go out on the town to parties, debauched art openings, and book launches in cramped Soho basements. To be “Whirled up” is to have Whirl all over the face: lips, cheeks, smeared, messy, and an alluring air of fun and candour as a result. Whirl is a change of demeanour, a Sex and the City charade, and so, of course, telling stories about it is fun.

Recently, at a very serious event, I told someone that the colour on my lips was the same shade that artist Rose Wylie wears, a fact I discovered after months of research, colour matching from photographs, and general sleuthing. The tall tale was spontaneous, but well-timed: Wylie's massive Royal Academy show had just opened, and like Whirl, she was on everyone's lips. Wylie is the first female painter to be given the grand first-floor rooms at the Royal Academy for a history-making solo show. At 91, she is an art-world rebel.

Whirl is close-ish to the colour Wylie was wearing when she was photographed by Juergen Teller for Loewe's Spring Summer 2025 campaign. And, yet again, close-ish to the colour she wears in her painted self-portraits, the signature flash of red lipstick, which is also found in her paintings of 20th-century Hollywood celebrities. It is all a part of the mythos. Urban legends spread fast where art and glamour meet. The story I told about Whirl was not true, but everyone I spoke to that night believed me. Because Whirl is cool, complex, eccentric, and chameleonic enough that it really could have been. Whirl is a colour that looks like it belongs on an iconoclast artist, a painter of brilliant and joyful canvases, renowned for doing her own thing. 

The truth about Whirl is less exciting, albeit still tied to an extremely influential woman. After Kylie Jenner revealed that she used the MAC Whirl lip liner to achieve her signature nude lip, MAC capitalised on the frenzy and created a matching lipstick. The shade became an internet sensation overnight; it witnessed a 2015 kind of virality, a story with so little longevity that new false accounts have since eclipsed it entirely.

Whirl has lent itself well to a new mythology. It has shed its Kardashian-adjacent origins. It is a colour strong enough to be storied.