A woman is saying that Rihanna’s MAC lipstick gave her oral herpes and has filed a lawsuit in New York.
Starkeema Greenidge of Harlem told the New York Daily News that a representative of MAC Cosmetics applied a used tube of RiRi Woo lipstick on her lips at a Rihanna concert in Brooklyn.
Two days later, she said, a cold sore developed on her lip, and a doctor diagnosed it as herpes.
“I wasn’t able to work for two weeks. It cost me a lot of money. This is going to happen over and over again if nothing is done,” she told the paper.
The woman filed a lawsuit in the Manhattan Supreme Court over the matter.
“(MAC) didn’t use a fresh or new lipstick tube, but rather one that had been used for other patrons,” reads the lawsuit.
Doctors say that it is possible to contract the herpes simplex virus from a item--such as lipstick--that touched and infected person’s lips.
“If a woman has a cut on her lip and borrows lipstick from someone who has a cold sore, she'll get a cold sore. You can pass herpes [the cold sore virus], conjunctivitis [pink eye] and all sorts of things through sharing makeup,” Beverly Hills dermatologist Dr. Zein Obagi told the Los Angeles Times.
