The Year Of The Lipstick

Advice about routines often sounds the same: wake up earlier, exercise daily, meditate, journal, drink more water, read more books, practice gratitude, plan the day before it begins. For some people these layered routines work beautifully. They thrive on structure, habit stacking, and carefully designed mornings and evenings.

But not everyone is built that way.

For many people, the idea of maintaining a long list of daily habits doesn’t feel motivating — it feels exhausting. Particularly during the busiest seasons of life, routines can quickly turn into another form of pressure rather than something supportive.

A small moment during a dinner between old friends recently captured this perfectly.

One of them, a partner in a firm and mother to two young children, stood up from the table to go to the restroom and deliberately picked up her lipstick before leaving. When asked about it, she smiled and explained: this is the year of the lipstick.

It wasn’t a joke.

Life for her is currently full in the way many parents recognise — early mornings, school runs, work responsibilities, household logistics, and the constant mental load that comes with raising young children. There is very little space for elaborate routines or perfectly structured mornings.

So instead of trying to build ten habits she would struggle to maintain, she chose one.

Lipstick.

No matter how busy the day becomes, she puts it on. Before meetings, before leaving the house, sometimes even just before walking out of the bathroom. It takes seconds, but it’s something she consistently returns to.

That small ritual carries more meaning than it might appear to at first glance.

It’s a quiet act of intention in a life that is otherwise very full. A moment of self-acknowledgement during days that are often focused entirely on work, family, and responsibilities. A reminder that even in the middle of demanding seasons, there can still be one small thing that belongs just to her.

The idea of choosing one thing might sound almost too simple, but simplicity is exactly what makes it powerful.

When children are young, life becomes a complex balance of competing demands. Time is fragmented. Energy is stretched. The expectation to maintain a long list of self-improvement habits can feel unrealistic and, for many, quietly discouraging.

But one small ritual is different.

It removes the pressure of perfection. It recognises that routines need to match the season of life someone is in. Instead of asking, How can everything fit in? the question becomes: What is one thing that can realistically stay?

That one thing becomes an anchor.

For some it might be lipstick. For someone else it could be a ten-minute walk each day, a cup of tea before the house wakes up, lighting a candle in the evening, stretching before bed, or reading a single page of a book.

It doesn’t need to be ambitious.

It just needs to be consistent.

In a culture that often celebrates productivity and optimisation, choosing only one habit can feel counterintuitive. But small rituals are often the ones that survive real life. Large, perfectly designed routines tend to collapse when schedules change, sleep is interrupted, or responsibilities increase.

Tiny habits bend rather than break.

And perhaps that is the real lesson behind something as simple as a tube of lipstick.

Not every season of life is designed for reinvention, transformation, or perfectly balanced routines. Some seasons are about holding everything together while raising families, building careers, and navigating the everyday pressures of adulthood.

During those times, the goal does not need to be doing everything well.

Sometimes the goal is simply keeping one small promise to yourself — every day, even when life is busy.

One ritual.

One moment of consistency.

One small thing that quietly says: I’m still here too.

And for many people, especially in the demanding years of young families, that may be exactly enough.