Review: "Lipstick" by Eileen G'Sell

Lipstick by Eileen G'Sell
Published February 2025 via Bloomsbury Academic
★★★★

The latest in one of my favorite thought-provoking nonfiction series! Lipstick delves into (surprise!) some of the sociocultural implications of lipstick. G'Sell is herself an enthusiastic (passionate, even) wearer of lipstick, and has been since her youth, but what lipstick means for a White woman of a certain generation is not what lipstick means for everyone.

Margaret, a visual artist and professor, submitted "a passionate thesis" for her undergraduate honors degree in 1975, "on makeup as a masking, negative abomination. Fifty years later, she joked to me, "I was wearing lipstick when I wrote it, a natural-looking gloss. And the strange thing is, I adore lipstick now." For many Boomer women in their youth, lipstick seemed a sexist throwback in a time that demanded radical change. (loc. 630*)

I love the nuance of this book—G'Sell talks about people to whom lipstick represents oppression and people to whom lipstick represents freedom; people to whom lipstick represents conformity and people to whom lipstick represents uniqueness...and sometimes people to whom lipstick has represented all of those things, depending on time and circumstance. Think sex and gender and race and nationality and economics and capitalism and much more.

Makeup has never really been my thing (I said when I read Snack that my partner despairs of my approach to dinner...well, my mother-in-law despairs of my approach to makeup). I'd put that down to my parents (quasi-hippies both), but my sister did get whatever recessive makeup gene I didn't, so... In any case, G'Sell hits it on the nose when she observes that lipstick can feel like an easy just-one-thing (and again when she observes that, for many, it can also feel like too much). This doesn't make me want to start wearing lipstick on the regular—and that's not the point of the book anyway. But it does make me think hmm, maybe a bolder color next time we go see the in-laws.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.