Jamaica: Angry crowd chases man wearing lipstick into store

Hundreds of onlookers gathered as word of incident spread

A man who was reportedly applying lipstick in public angered passersby in May Pen, Clarendon, a parish near Jamaica’s south coast.

According to the TV Jamaica report, the man was chased into a store, where he stayed for more than an hour while a large crowd gathered in the carpark after word of the incident spread. Store staff called the police, who arrived on the scene, tried to control the crowd, and eventually escorted the man into a car that was immediately surrounded by the surging crowd as it was driven away.

In the video, people can be seen with mobile phones at the ready — some standing on cars and other objects — to try to take a photograph of the man as he emerged from the store.

TV Jamaica reports that many of the people in the crowd, chanting that they wanted to see him, expressed disgust that the man had been wearing lipstick, one spectator saying the town doesn’t welcome men who do that, while a woman called for the man to be “sent” on his way.

Natasha Barsotti is originally from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. She had high aspirations of representing her country in Olympic Games sprint events, but after a while the firing of the starting gun proved too much for her nerves. So she went off to university instead. Her first professional love has always been journalism. After pursuing a Master of Journalism at UBC , she began freelancing at Xtra West — now Xtra Vancouver — in 2006, becoming a full-time reporter there in 2008.

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