Among women who wear lipstick — and some 80 percent of us do — there are two types: those who feel nude without a dark, dramatic slash of crimson on their lips, and those who prefer their lips to look “nude.” (Or rather the cosmetics industry’s idea of “nude,” a hue that is nothing like actual human lips in the buff.)

In the first group are the divas, the drama queens, the glamour pusses, rebel-punks and icons in the making: the look-at-me women who love attention and know that wearing an arresting lip color is a blatant, easy way of attracting some. These women view loud lipstick as an accessory they would never go without, as fundamental to the image they want to project as fabulous high heels. Their patron saints include Clara Bow, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Dita Von Teese and even the fictional Betty Draper — women so associated with their lip color that it’s difficult to imagine them without it. Bold-lip aficionados believe, as Diane Von Furstenberg once quipped, that “lipstick is to the face as punctuation is to a sentence.”

Those of us who belong to the second group, however, cringe at the thought of noticeable makeup. That’s not to say we don’t wear it; some of us spend an inordinate amount of time applying products in order to appear as if we don’t have any on. Dark lipstick, in my view, has always been the cosmetic equivalent of a persnickety foreign sports car: awesome to behold, maybe fun to test-drive, but requiring far too much maintenance for everyday life.

And so, although I had a brief, “Friends”-era flirtation with a shiny eggplant lipstick, I’ve belonged to the latter camp for most of my adult life, favoring soft pinkish-brown shades that are as introverted as I am. As a teenager, I first fell in love with the color when I saw it on Audrey Hepburn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” It seemed, like her, impossibly sophisticated, elegant and classy. “Hand me my purse, will you, darling? A girl can’t read that sort of thing without her lipstick,” she chirps with forced brightness to George Peppard’s writer-character, Paul Varjak, as he prepares to read her a breakup letter from her Brazilian lover. In the mid-1990s, when I discovered Bobbi Brown’s palette of neutrals (she introduced her first collection of 10 shades in 1991), I was hooked. I wore her Raisin and her Rose for years, later cheating with M.A.C.’s Twig. Not long ago, I returned to Bobbi, favoring yet another variation on the theme, this time Sandwash Pink.