2023-12-08 13:00:00
The Livres de Libédossier notebookA saga by Rachel Kahn and Christophe Fort on the famous stick.
Written in current vocabulary, at the risk of anachronism, served by beautiful illustrations which dare to recreate the faces of Diane de Poitiers or Elizabeth I, this “lipstick saga”, begun in 3000 BC. C., closes on the present use of cosmetics by both sexes, for emancipatory and subversive purposes. The originality of this work is to be as pleasant – a trademark of the two authors who belong to the world of television creation – as it is scholarly, because it is nourished by the work of historians and interviews with anthropologists, psychoanalysts, writers and of those who gravitate around the famous stick.
Lead and mercury levels
Its history is not linear, as its use has always had a social, gendered, even political significance. As proof: for Cleopatra, this paste made from ants is “a marker of power and a spiritual link with the beyond”, for the prudish bourgeoisie of the 19th century, lipstick, democratized by synthetic chemistry, identifies bad women! Thus is extended the condemnation of Plato for whom makeup is “a perverse, deceptive, vulgar and servile activity”. However, from the 5th century BC, doctors attributed the benefits of a protective balm to lipstick. On the contrary, it is its harmfulness which alarms their colleagues of the Grand Siècle because its components are the same as those of paint, and this at a time when cosmetics are better accepted, at least by the social elite, and not only by the women. While advances in dental hygiene invite you to smile with all your teeth, lipstick continues to endanger your health, due to its lead and mercury levels; also, this makeup adopts softer colors. If the Revolution, keen to banish the practices of the Ancien Régime, opened a new sequence in this history, that of industry intensified production. From then on, the debate on lipstick revolves around the freedom of women: trapped, according to some, by gendered assignments, amplified by the consumer society, escaping them, according to others, by displaying their own canons of beauty and individualizing their personality.
Rachel Kahn & Christophe Fort, the Crazy History of Lipstick, Herscher, 202 pp., €29.
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