Red Lipstick
Charlene Elsby on makeup as artist's statement, Lancôme Red Stiletto and staving off existential despair with discount hand soap.
I walked into the Bath & Body Works because they’d already emailed me twice that day to say that the hand soaps were on the biggest sale of the year, and I shouldn’t miss out. I’d taken up with scents, because they’re a way of deriving pleasure from a mundane task when happiness is in short supply. When the rational world of thoughts perambulating becomes too invasive, there’s always the physical to withdraw to. I subscribed to the promotional emails because, even though I didn’t need to be reminded twice a day that there are hand soaps, the other option is not to be reminded and every time I think of unsubscribing, that option still seems worse.
Hand soaps are a way to delight the senses, to spite higher consciousness, and they’re on sale for $3.75.
I’d already gone through the rest of the possible routes to sensation. I waited for the sales at Yankee Candle to make the air a little less heavy with doom. I bought the nice lipsticks from Ulta, when they offered coupons that included prestige brands and let me apply the thousands of points I’d amassed through bonus events and impulse purchases meant to stave off despair. I had enough lipstick to last for years, in myriad shades of red and pink but also some that didn’t fit the reds’ and pinks’ intention of “enhancing one’s natural beauty”—the blue, the turquoise, the glitter stick.
Hand soaps are a way to delight the senses, to spite higher consciousness, and they’re on sale for $3.75.
I don’t believe that cosmetics are meant to enhance natural beauty, and I never have. But I recognize the immense social coercion faced when one attempts to circumvent the standard use of the standard products for the standard purpose. How much less powerful I’d become by choosing to conform to the expected instead of prioritizing the aesthetic purpose of what is, primarily, art.
I never used to play that game. When I first switched from gloss to stick, I sneered at the pinks and reds. Those are lip colors. Normal lip colors. Why bother?
Why wear makeup if you can’t see it?
Why put in the effort if no one will notice?
If no one will see the work you’ve done and appreciate it?
If the best you can hope for is that no one will make note of you?
To exist as unobjectionable?
As if to live, having never bothered anyone, is actually the purpose?
Back then stores didn’t carry the variant lipstick colors, or if they did I couldn’t afford them, so I’d buy these little pots of gloss from the farmer’s market where I worked the grill at the corner stand selling sausages and fries. Another booth had these lip gloss pots that you could screw together, walk around with six glosses in your pocket. And then I’d get a Cover Girl eye shadow, crush the powder into it, melt the concoction in the microwave, stir it with a Q-tip and melt it again so that when it cooled, it’d have the nice sheen on top. Blues and purples. Black. Shining white. “You just look like you don’t have any lips.” Yes, I thought. An anomaly.
At a certain age and in a certain milieu, you are no longer allowed to be strange but also, importantly, you can’t kiss boys and have their lips turn blue. I went back to gloss after that guy said it was my fault his girlfriend found my lipstick where it shouldn’t have been.
There are some things a human can create that can’t be destroyed, the same way we can do things that can’t be undone.
I became obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. I read that she had said once that she loved her face, because it could become anything. Finally, an infinite potential existed, when all I seemed to sense were obstacles and frustrations and artificial limitations that, no matter how artificial I recognized them to be, how human-constructed, could not be overcome. There are some things a human can create that can’t be destroyed, the same way we can do things that can’t be undone.
I resented Andy Warhol’s representation of Marilyn. Her face was already paint, and his overdoing it had to be mockery. She was already a cartoon drawn on top of a natural face to make her easier to see from far away, to make her loveable by more people who couldn’t get close, far away in space or in my case, time. I bought black eyeliner and white shadow and red lipstick which, according to a girl I met once in the bathroom, I could really pull off. “If I put that on, I’d look like a slut,” she said, “But not you.” I took it as a compliment at the time.
I resented Andy Warhol’s representation of Marilyn. Her face was already paint, and his overdoing it had to be mockery.
The better-quality lipsticks are really worth it, if you can afford them. I remember being poor and how I believed Billy on Melrose Place when he made a speech about how quality was just a marketing scheme used to trick the rich into paying more for the same things, but that isn’t true. If you can get a $40 lipstick, do it. It’s at least ten times better than the $5 ones and even the $15 ones that promise never to come off, except they do and in weird flakes.
I put on Lancôme Red Stiletto to buy hand soap.
The cashier rejected me immediately.
“The line is over there,” she said and pointed behind a couple who were clearly just browsing, near as they were to the impulse items near the register. Instead of correcting the cashier, I accepted my fate as someone over whom she now had control, standing as she was in the seat of power behind the cash and I, standing before her asking her to please sell this soap to me, half price.
I walked behind the browsing couple as instructed and when they saw me, they broke immediately, saying “Oh, we’re not in line.”
The cashier looked on in shame as I approached once more, perhaps realizing the full responsibility that attended the power she held and what might happen if it were abused. And for the rest of the transaction, she flattered me. All of the good choices I had made, how smart I was to take advantage of the sale, how it was the best sale to happen all year, how much she liked my red lipstick. “High quality,” she said, and I wondered if she could tell how low quality of a person I was, and if she was remarking on the obvious difference between me as a person and the lipstick that I wore, how one of us came from the prestige section, while the other was shopping for half price hand soap at the mall.
She gave me my soaps in their signature bag. Paper but with a sturdy handle, for carrying and compostability, the bottom reinforced with cardboard that also advertised the safest way to burn a candle. I drove away with my bag in the passenger seat, thinking of how long the soaps might last and how, in the days to follow, there’d be times that would be difficult to get through, but even through those times, several times a day, I’d have the opportunity to, at least, smell something nice.
How that bag of soap plus my red lipstick would get me through the next few months.
The Grand Dame is in da House. Welcome. Preshate Ya fnding me on heah.