This is a photo essay without a photo. Sometimes words should not be distracted by photos, and sometimes photos should not be accompanied with words. I would say that is the case most often. And so here it is, some words without photos, about shades of a woman’s lipstick.
The girl wears blue lipstick in her early teens despite her mother’s criticism, but she’s obsessed with the colour and so she will do it one way or another. The blue turns into lip glosses of her late teens and when she’s practicing to be more independently ‘herself’, with her boy-cut short hair and short shorts or long shirts, she wears bright, loud colours– all the riske names in the lip range: Rebel, Ruby Wood, Impassioned, Girl About Town, etc. These are demanding shades, full of drama. They were also disposable — one day she felt like orange and at night switched to dark brown. The world was a colourful palette of options.
In a particularly angsty couple of months when she had started taking pregnancy pills for the first time which had made her body blow up and skin act up, and she lived with a roommate who liked mind games and would let her insecurities form into lies and manipulative acts of kindness, our girl wore the darkest colour available in the shop: Noir. Her mother disapproved.
A few years later, when the girl really was becoming a woman and not practicing any more, the red lipstick became a staple. This was a richer red, at times distracting the eyes of others from her puffy eyes and at times silencing them into listening to the words that were coming from in between the red. Her dedication to lipstick also meant that public kisses, at moments when she was not bare faced at home, would have to be only rarely granted. Only when there was no other word or way of affection left, because the red would leave a mark on the culprits.
A few years later, she lives with fewer lipsticks. The red still appears sometimes — it is her history, representing both the girl she was and the woman she is, but she doesn’t find the need to wear it always, like armour. This woman has a new colour: dark pink. It’s a pink with subtle brown hues, a more saturated version of her natural lip pigments. It has an unassuming presence but one that is meaningful and deep. This is a colour she will wear to work, or to dinner, or on camera. A colour she believes in because it is simply a more pronounced version of what she already has on her lips, and she likes the candour of that. Because in this world, there are far fewer shades she can ever trust in. So the ones she finds, she will keep for a long time to come.
*Art by Hideaki Kawashima