I Hate It

Swarnim Lamsal

It was yet another Mars-Venus encounter: I asked one of my girl friends not to put that on, as it was melting and beginning to flow down her lips but with each fall, she kept on adding a new layer. I gave up and she smiled showing the same abominable thing: the lipstick. Lipstick would enhance one’s beauty; particularly in this age of pouts and selfies, it, no doubt, does so: “Ready for a selfie?” “Wait, let me put on the lipstick and show an elegant pout.” The result might be a photogenic portrait but the implication is broader one: lipstick perpetuates the belief that a woman has to be beautifully inside out. It is a tool for ordaining the stereotypical gender roles that females have, for centuries, try to defy.

Lipstick is believed to have a benefit of adding up confidence. Adding a gloss on a smile, it generally shows that the girl is persuasive and positive. She seems to be more comfortable with lipstick on than not. But is it not a question of habit? People are prone to see ladies with lipstick and further mark women into different categories like beautiful, disgraceful, phony, and eloquent among others. Such categorization is, indeed a product of stereotypical society where males decide and comment. Furthermore, this is a question of male gaze. Males gaze and stare; females speak and act. In an interview or a presentation, if a boy is more into her lipstick than her talks, it is not that her lipstick is acting as a catalyst; it is a subject of habituated males who define females through the eyes of their make-up only. The lipstick has nothing to do with beauty; it is only a reflection of how much artificiality and hypocrisy is admired in the society. Lipstick is a marker of a serious mendaciousness.

Moreover, lipstick is another dividing line between males and females. I once tried putting on lipstick, assuming that it will give me the glamour for which it is generally marked. But it failed. The youth that it promises is only for a girl and the full-stop is gives to the ageing process is not given to a man. Perhaps this is not a humorous distinction, but is a continuation of the divisions between the two sexes that have been continuing since time immemorial: Females must act beautiful; the essence of their definition is to look fashionable. Though, with the change of time, the demands for “good looking men” is abundant, it is almost undeniable that this demand seems minimal when compared to what many females ought to go through, including all those surgeries, parlors and many more, for making themselves look adorable. Lipstick, then, is another name for the guitar whose cords are in some historical music of divisive beauty.

In order to keep away the comments that people would pass (and it is very difficult to avoid them), the girls would choose one from a variety of lipsticks available in order to match with the shape of their lips, skin complexion and attires. Though this might seem to be a freedom of choice from the varieties, this actually is a curtailed freedom. Freedom, after all, is leisure that you get for free, unless it gets into someone else’s nose. Choosing a lipstick might be engaging but it costs money. Furthermore, while choosing one’s lipstick, one has to do a lot of trials. Lipstick then is the trial against one’s lips where lips are always a subject of experimentation and tests. And the winner, ultimately, would be the consumerist culture, which Xeroxes the idea of beauty right from the fashion world to the real world.

Lipstick is the advertisement of the lips. One of the common poses for the female models is a close-up of their face and there, we can see a detailed emphasis on the lips. The female film stars give flying kiss with so much of gusto, especially when they are with their lipstick on (and that is almost always); many of the movies we watch show the dark imprint of lipstick on the window panes to hint an upcoming kissing scene. This shows that lipstick is the marker of fame and even something as private as a kiss. Lipstick is the romanticization of the female beauty, which again is what the feminists abhor. A body is being sold through an object.

I do not deny that some females really wish to put on lipstick and the recent developments of feminist critics also supports the policy of “do what you like and that is your essence.” In fact, I respect that if they are willingly putting it on. My rancor is against the practice of developing a habit by the consumerist society that all the females should be beautiful and that can be done by a thing as minor as a lipstick.

Alongside with the implications for the decorum of beauty, our culture suggests that lipstick is an age marker: the adolescent girl puts a bright one but lightly, the married girl puts a bright one and darkly, and this bright color keeps on fading as one ages. Lipstick, then, is a mere marker of the impending death. Till the point a woman reaches the last phase of the natural cycle, she is rarely seen to be putting on a lipstick. With each flow of her lipstick and the marks of her lipstick, a woman in our culture would unknowingly feel the slow call of Yamaraj. The layers of lipstick she would add on are futile attempts to make a death of the death. If lipstick can do a mass killing how can I love it? I hate it.

Lipstick is a drug prescribed as compulsion by the society. Used since ages, this has been a perennial marker of beauty, but the beauty is again a product of the patriarchal standards of dividing males and females. Not being allowed to use red lipstick during widowhood and similar examples show that the lipstick is generally put on for the males. Be it a product from the film city or the fashion arena, lipstick continues to remain a favorite make-up tool for the females and this, without their realization, has been also a tool of the romanticization and idealization of their beauty, which ultimately brings them to the same position (that of a foot on a pedestal) against which the feminist rose with an ardent energy. Lipstick is a part of great appalling design that seems to be perpetuated for generations and it should be checked accordingly otherwise this drug can grow so high that we remain just a numb mass.