Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Forget your mother’s tube of Revlon. Lipstick today is as messy—and fascinating—as changing attitudes towards femininity. Mining the experience of women across culture, class, and generation, this book tosses out expired ideas about beauty and power like so many tubes of melted wax.
Who wears lipstick today? For those who do, is it out of loyalty to a strict feminine standard? Or some other reason entirely? From MAC to Glossier, from Marilyn to Chappell Roan, lipstick is as shape-shifting and elusive as femininity itself.
Unpacking the history of feminism’s anti-lipstick sentiments, debunking long-standing fallacies, and digging into how Gen Z is using lipstick to explode gender norms, Lipstick explores how self-adornment can be a source of play, pleasure, and transformation
Reviews
“Brilliant, biting, and irresistibly stylish, Lipstick treats beauty as the serious subject that it is. With deep insight, lyrical precision, and humor, Eileen G’Sell examines how painted lips expose the tensions between conformity and self-expression, beauty standards and personal agency. Less a book about makeup, and more about what we make of ourselves, this is cultural criticism at its most relatable and relevant.”
— Zahra Hankir, author of Eyeliner: A Cultural History (2023)
“What if pigmented wax was one of humanity’s oldest technologies of honesty? In this homage to the form, Eileen G’Sell gives us a lipstick for all. Her elegant book not only lays out the cultural evolution of the object, but points to the expansively feminist ethics and latently utopian politics of colorful mouths. Pucker up, dive in, and dispel your femmephobia today.”
— Sophie Lewis, author of Enemy Feminisms (2025)
About the author
Eileen G’Sell is a poet and culture critic whose work focuses on gender, sexuality, and economic class. Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Jacobin, Current Affairs
and Hyperallergic, among other publications. In 2023, she received the Rabkin prize in arts journalism. She is also the film critic for The Hopkins Review, an award-winning literary and culture magazine out of Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a teaching professor of college writing in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.