The Healing Power Of Lipstick

Against A Backdrop Of The Freshest Lip Colours, We Salute The Extraordinary Emotional Perks Wrapped Up In A Single Tube

- Fiorella Valdesolo

 Lipstick may be small in size, but it packs major meaning – a significance beyond what a punny shade name and pretty packaging suggest. Just take a look at any one of the many varied roles it’s played over its estimated 5 000-year history. There’s lipstick the protector: in Elizabethan times, women thought wearing it could help ward off death’s crawl. There’s lipstick the rebel: iconic suffragettes Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Elizabeth Cady Stanton slicked their mouths in red – a look that, at the time, was considered the province of “loose women” – as a form of sartorial protest. But perhaps its most potent, and most overlooked, incarnation is that of lipstick the healer. In the most literal sense, lipstick provides a reliable tonic in trying times. For cancer patients, it often serves as a symbol (however small) of health and vibrancy. “Lipstick helps restore a normal sense of self that a patient can lose during incredibly difficult cancer treatments and help them feel like themselves,” says gynaecologist and oncologist Dr Bobbie Rimel.

The same ameliorative effect can be seen in other women who have undergone massive changes to their bodies: in her recent study of the relationship between women and makeup, Dr Madeleine Ogilvie, an associate professor of business at Edith Cowan University in Australia, discovered that lipstick helped recent mothers reconnect with their femininity. “If they were feeling asexualised and unglamorous in their new mother role, by putting on their lipstick, it was almost like getting back to their old identity,” she explains.

Beyond these more extreme physical and emotional circumstances, lipstick provides a daily dose of colour therapy. In a WH Twitter poll, 51 percent of respondents said that the right lipstick can positively impact their mood.