Lipstick: (Object Lessons)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. From Revlon to Glossier, from Marilyn to Gaga, lipstick is as shape-shifting and unwieldy as femininity itself. Who wears lipstick today – as a matter of routine? And for those who do, is it out of obligation to a strict feminine standard, or some other reason entirely? Lipstick reconsiders the beauty world's most conspicuous – and contentious – tool of artifice. Tossing expired ideas about femininity like so many tubes of melting wax, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation, as well as how lipstick can knock gender norms off balance.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Painted Ladies and Tainted Men Lipstick Story #1: Margaret 2. Painted Ladies and Painted Men Sidebar #1: The Pesky Endurance of Public High School Lipstick Bans Lipstick Story #2: Maurice 3. Lipstick Feminism and Sticky Pleasures Sidebar #2: The Myth of the Red-Lipped Suffragette Lipstick Story #3: Shaela 4. Whitewashed Beauty, Appropriation, and Lipstick Legacies Sidebar #3: Four Decades of Lipstick Lyrics and Music Videos Lipstick Story #4: Dorothea 5. A Femme-Friendlier Future? Acknowledgments Notes Index

About the Author :
Eileen G'Sell is Teaching Professor of College Writing at Washington University, St. Louis, USA. She is also the film critic for The Hopkins Review, an award-winning literary and culture magazine published by Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Baffler, Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Belt Magazine, Current Affairs, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. In 2023, she received the Rabkin prize in arts journalism.

Review :
Foundation conceals. Mascara enhances. But lipstick? Lipstick transforms. That's the premise of Eileen G'Sell's brilliant ode to the most conspicuous of cosmetics ... A rousing manifesto. Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G'Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant. What if pigmented wax was one of humanity's oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G'Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today. Lipstick is a dynamic and original read. More than just a history lesson, Lipstick is provocative, funny and challenges the reader to think differently about an object they've known most of their life ...You'll never look at a tube of lipstick the same way again. In Lipstick, Eileen G'Sell treats what looks like purely frivolous subject matter as worthy of academic exploration ... In G'Sell's hands, it becomes a salient cultural artifact used to clarify historical and contemporary notions of feminism, gender, class, and race, with the nuance of two bright reds featuring subtle but different undertones.