Lipstick is really a metonym for larger systems of adornment, especially feminine adornment. Though it’s part of the Object Lessons series, the book, Lipstick, is not a comprehensive history of the object. Other books have done that quite well, including Ilise S. Carter’s The Red Menace, which came out in 2021. When writing the book, my interests were more driven by curiosity about the long-held tension between femininity and feminism, and how that tension manifests differently across cultures.

Having read several of the Object Lessons books, I admired the series and how their pithy volumes mingle academic rigor with accessibility—and the fact that personal narrative is not only allowed, but welcome. In my cultural criticism, I have generally avoided personal narrative, so this was a challenge—but an exciting one at that. About 15% of Lipstick is first person, which felt necessary. My experience of lipstick is anchored in my generational and cultural context, and is anything but universal.

To reflect the wild range of lipstick experiences, I interviewed about 100 women and non-binary people between ages 18 and the mid-to-late 70s—Muslim women, South Asian women, British women, Black women, trans women—to unpack why there are such strong emotions around the object. Many trusted me to include their voices to the book, for which I am grateful. Lipstick is a small thing, but it can be very charged. That’s why I felt it was a perfect subject. While it was truly enlightening to learn about other women’s experiences, it was also rewarding to think more deeply about how my own upbringing—and the broader political forces therein—affected how I’ve experienced beauty culture, and lip color specifically.

For the last 20 years, I have been invested in questions of gender, sexuality, power, and economic class. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, a time presenting many conflicting messages about what it meant to be a woman—perhaps especially an upwardly mobile “professional woman”. As a teenager, I gravitated toward a rebellious, subcultural feminist identity. At the same time, I have always gravitated toward flashy, colorful, feminine aesthetics, even though my mother was not invested in these proclivities at all. Unsurprisingly, my very Midwestern, conservative, Catholic family was not exactly supportive!

I'm not from an upper-middle-class American family. While my parents are college educated, much of my family in the Midwest are construction workers. If you Google my last name, you'll find construction companies, and then you'll find me. Very contradictory impulses. Given the lack of academics in my family, for better or for worse, I couldn’t entirely predict what academia would look like or what type of person it would welcome. As a grad student in the aughts, it was very clear that flashy lipstick and fashion were not exactly the norm—and could come with professional or social consequences. But why has lipstick—or any penchant for colorful style—contoured the way we interpret a person’s intellectual depth or moral substance? I wrote this book in part to find out.