Description: Examines the messy, manifold meanings of beauty's most popular tool of artifice.
Brief description: Eileen G'Sell is Teaching Professor of College Writing at Washington University of St. Louis, USA. She is also the film critic for The Hopkins Review, an award-winning literary and culture magazine published by Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Baffler, Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books, Current Affairs, Film Quarterly, and Hyperallergic, among other publications. In 2023, she received the Rabkin prize in arts journalism.
Review Quotes:
"Foundation conceals. Mascara enhances. But lipstick? Lipstick transforms. That's the premise of Eileen G'Sell's brilliant ode to the most conspicuous of cosmetics ... A rousing manifesto." --Book Supplement Substack
"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, culture writer and author of Eyeliner: A Cultural History "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 and Femmephilia "Lipstick is a dynamic and original read." --BookPage "More than just a history lesson, Lipstick is provocative, funny and challenges the reader to think differently about an object they've known most of their life ...You'll never look at a tube of lipstick the same way again." --Webster-Kirkwood Times "In Lipstick, Eileen G'Sell treats what looks like purely frivolous subject matter as worthy of academic exploration ... In G'Sell's hands, it becomes a salient cultural artifact used to clarify historical and contemporary notions of feminism, gender, class, and race, with the nuance of two bright reds featuring subtle but different undertones." --St Louis Magazine