“With a tiny gold knife I slice a morsel from the beet and rub it onto my lips and cheek.” Ultra Violet, Famous for 15 Minutes (1988).

Beet are one of those vegetables I’m sort of afraid of.  I’ve never eaten them, and I wouldn’t even know how to prepare them if I did.  But I bought one expressly for this purpose, sliced off a piece with a mostly-dull kitchen knife and proceeded to put it on my face.

The beet gave my lips a slight red tint, less than my Dr. Pepper lip gloss but more than Vaseline.  My fingertips took on a brilliant flush, and my cheeks took on the splotchy red tint of acne, or a bad fever.  

This is why God invented lipstick–so we didn’t have to rub beets on our faces and could leave them in the ground.