Another Day, Another Lipstick

By Shruti Sardesai, Originally posted on Femsplain.com

I grew to love lipsticks at the same time that I began to hate my body. I was 17, overweight, and loved food. I had just finished watching “Prince Caspian” one night with a childhood friend when I was groped by a (smiling) usher at my local movie theater. Enraged, I complained about it to my friend as we took the escalator to the ground floor. His response? “I wouldn’t do that to you; you’re too chubby.”

My heart sank as I suddenly recalled years of my mother telling me to lose weight (for my own health), and my classmates teasing me (my best friend at the time even compared me to a frog). I began to notice all the thin white models that adorned billboards, shop displays, and magazine covers. I was just a fat Indian girl; I seemed stuck in a raging, judgmental vortex. My teenage self felt alone, defeated by the world, and stuck on a one-way road to indolence.

So I ran.

I ran to my exercise bike the day I wrote my last ever exam in school, and a week later I ran to my mother’s Christian Dior lipstick. As I lost weight, my lipstick collection grew. I entered my freshman year at university with petal pink lips, lashes nearly as long as the Great Wall, and a face that didn’t match the color of my neck because my powder was the wrong color. Still, I thought I was doing it right: More men began to notice me, smile at me, and flirt with me. I’d lost 15 kilos, and my lipstick collection was ever-expanding. I even had an MS Excel sheet just to keep track of my lipstick hoard. Things had begun looking up for me.

Every time I applied a new color to my lips, I felt like a new, improved person. I would pop into my local cosmetics store so much that the employees knew me pretty well. I’m sure they even knew my routine (avoids glosses, heads straight for the mattes, leaves with a swatch-filled hand that would make a rainbow seem pale in comparison). My friends would buy me lipstick for every birthday, and I would be beyond thrilled at the new additions to my collection.

The old me has gone, I told myself with each lipstick I bought. This is my renaissance. Ugliness, begone!

And then, imperceptibly, something changed.

I’d always hated school, but while I was thrilled to have finally graduated, I dreaded university, that seething cauldron of anxiety and academics. But things changed. I went in as a journalism major before switching to international relations after my assigned advisor decided he’d rather play golf in his office than listen to my concerns. I met the professor who would come to be my new advisor, who taught me to love history and feminism, both of which were then strangers to me. I continued to collect lipsticks, but in hindsight, I saw that my colors went from muted colors to bolder tones.

I began to enjoy studying, and I became a vocal feminist. I spent my first semester poring over “Our Bodies, Ourselves”, which I checked out and read with my best friend one night at her house. I got into my first-ever relationship: with a man who never respected me and sent me a letter assuring me “all women are the same” and that I gave feminism a bad name for ending things after bearing months of his emotional abuse. I put the pain from that tumult into a 35-page research paper on prostitution in Victorian Britain with the help of my ever-supportive advisor. I joined clubs, became a research assistant for a professor who taught me the value of patient inquiry, and found fast friends. I also met my current partner in a sociology class, and he asked me out over Steam chat in a month (very romantic, I know — I love him all the same).

And as I changed, so did the lipstick.

I pored over books and articles about Second Wave feminists who believed makeup was a creation of the patriarchy, meant to shackle women to unfair standards of beauty for the male gaze. I read Third Wave discussions on reclaiming that which was meant to bind women, to take it back and make it ours. It dawned on me that I had been hiding behind the lipstick all that time, religiously applying it every morning to ensure my armor was complete before I left the house (or sometimes, even within it). Not wearing lipstick made me feel naked, vulnerable, and worthless. I’d also taken to fretting about the laugh lines that were steadily deepening around my mouth. My vanity was a reflection of my brittle ego, and my tools severely were misused. I had wanted to escape dullness, but I was doing it the wrong way, and needed to start over.

My changes were not conscious. They were gradual, and they initiated reactions in people that I enjoy witnessing even today. As I became someone less invested in counting calories (or the pathetic gazes of overconfident college boys), the colors changed too. My collection — previously overwhelmingly rosy mauves and shades of sultry red — grew to include dusty lavenders, neon pinks, and loud oranges. The first time I wore orange lipstick, I felt bright and alive, while my mother blinked in shock for a while. My neighbors said that it was unbecoming and over-the-top, and a few of my university acquaintances snarkily quipped about my unconventional choice of color. But I didn’t care, because I wasn’t trying to be conventional anymore. I wasn’t trying to fit in, and I wasn’t in the mood to care about what people thought of me. I felt different, even though my routine was the same. The change in colors made me feel like I was someone bolder than I thought I was, and that fortified me. For a while, I had to defend my “socially questionable” colors to people around me (and that took a lot of patience!), but I am who I am, and they’ve grown to accept it, if not all the colors I choose.

I recently bought my first green lipstick. I enjoyed the thrill of opening the packaging, of applying it, of seeing my reflection in the mirror, and of imagining the horrified reactions the color would elicit. I was far from home in graduate school, so no one knew until I had a video chat with my boyfriend, who insisted he adored how it looked on me. I have not yet found a reason to wear it in public, but I tremendously enjoy wearing it at home and feeling like a tough cookie.

As I flew home for the winter holidays, I wore a grey-based lavender lipstick. My fellow passengers on the flight glanced at me repeatedly. My mother tutted me when she saw me in the arrivals area, informing me matter-of-factly that I looked like a corpse. Once upon a time, I would have cared. Now, I can barely hear the words. I’m done trying to fit in, and I’m done trying to be someone I’m not. I still see the same billboards and magazine covers that earlier gave me anxiety, and I still feel pangs of longing for that look, but I’m working towards silencing those thoughts completely. Until then, I have my colors to comfort and revive me.