Keep That Lipstick Going
(It’s Never Finished)
(It’s Never Finished)
Can vanity
Ever be
A good thing,
Always there
In one form or another?
I wonder ‘bout its essence;
Ponder over properties.
Does it have a function partly unction?
Does it help keep us alive a little longer,
Or
Keep up illusions,
Nourishing our views of beauty
In a body always rotting, wrought with pain?
Solder man to Man?
Although St Augustine
Considered vanity a primal sin,
Perhaps it can.
Ever be
A good thing,
Always there
In one form or another?
I wonder ‘bout its essence;
Ponder over properties.
Does it have a function partly unction?
Does it help keep us alive a little longer,
Or
Keep up illusions,
Nourishing our views of beauty
In a body always rotting, wrought with pain?
Solder man to Man?
Although St Augustine
Considered vanity a primal sin,
Perhaps it can.
Le rouge à lèvres [Lipstick] -- Delphine Kreuter
Aurelius Augustinus became bishop of Hippo Regius (Annaba, Algeria). In his youth he had led a hedonistic lifestyle, praying at one point,"Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet." At 17 he began a 15-year-long affair with a woman from a lower class and fathered a child by her, but in 385 he ended their relationship in order to prepare to wed a 10-year-old heiress. He had to wait 2 years, however, since the law did not permit her to marry until she was 12, so he procured a new mistress until that time. Meanwhile, at 30, he had been named rhetoric professor at Mediolanum (Milano), the most prominent academic position in Europe at the time. After flirting with Manicheanism, at 31 he decided to become a celibate Christian priest instead. He was ordained in Hippo in 391, and became bishop in 395. Actively involved in theological disputation, he developed stringent views that have influenced European thought fever since. In one of his most important books, "De civitate Dei contra paganos" (The City of God Against the Pagans) he discssed
ReplyDelete"Ecclesiastes," traditionally written by king Solomon, saying, "This wisest man devoted this whole book to a full exposure of ... vanity, evidently with no other object than that we might long for that life in which there is no vanity under the sun, but verity under Him who made the sun. In this vanity, then, was it not by the just and righteous judgment of God that man, made like to vanity, was destined to pass away? But in these days of vanity it makes an important difference whether he resists or yields to the truth, and whether he is destitute of true piety or a partaker of it, -— important not so far as regards the acquirement of the blessings or the evasion of the calamities of this transitory and vain life, but in connection with the future judgment which shall make over to good men good things, and to bad men bad things, in permanent, inalienable possession."
The Sumerians were the 1st to find the area of a triangle and the volume of a cube, and the 1st to invent lipstick, about 5,000 years ago, by crushing gemstones. The Egyptians crushed bugs to create a red lipstick to show social status rather than gender. At about the same time women in the Indus valley applied red tinted lipstick to their lips. Lipsticks with shimmering effects were made from a pearlescent substance found in fish scales. Over 1,000 years ago the Chinese made lipsticks from beeswax to protect the skin, and during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) they added scented oils to give the mouth an enticing factor. Abulcasis (actually, Abū al-Qāsim Khalaf ibn al-‘Abbās al-Zahrāwī al-Ansari of Al-Andalus), "The father of surgery," considered cosmetics a branch of medicine, calling it the "Medicine of Beauty" (Adwiyat al-Zinah); his 30-volume "Kitab al-Tasrif," completed in 1000, also covered surgery, medicine, orthopaedics, ophthalmology, pharmacology, nutrition, dentistry, childbirth, pathology. He invented a perfumed stick rolled and pressed in a special mold, the earliest antecedent of modern lipsticks and solid deodorants. Due to religious constraints, lip coloring did not begin to gain popularity in England until the 16th century, but only among upper-class women and male actors. As late as the 19th century the obvious use of cosmetics was not acceptable for respectable women and was associated with prostitution. In 1884 Paris perfumer Aimé Guerlain made the 1st commercial lipstick (lip rouge, as it was called), using deer tallow, castor oil, and beeswax covered in silk paper. Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress of her time, initiated the practice of wearing lipstick and rouge in public, and the practice began to catch on, though a 1908 article "Hideous on a Young Girl" could still blandly claim, "I once saw a girl not more than twenty years old take out a pocket mirror and a stick of lip rouge in a fashionable restaurant filled with diners and calmly proceed to make up her mouth with only a perfunctory pretense of concealment.” Women who wanted to protect their cosmetics when they were out in public had to put them into metal containers, since cosmetics were only packaged in paper or cardboard wrappers, so jewelers designed tiny silver containers which could be hung on a chatelaine or as a single pendant ornament. When chatelaines went out of fashion they were replaced by large oblong "necessaires" (also called party boxes or dance purses). Dorin was marketing aluminum rouge boxes in France in 1910, and Houbigant was making brass double-face powder and ruge boxes in 1913, and American firms supplied lithographed tin boxes as promotional giveaways for their own face powder goods. Due to interruptions in supply caused by World War I, New York importer Maurice Levy created his own Hygienol brand of lambs wool powder puffs and, in 1915, he founded The French Cosmetic Manufacturing Company and (perhaps) invented cylindrical brass conainers with a tiny lever at the side to allow users to use the edge of their fingernails to move the lipstick in the tube up or down. In 1917 William Kendall patented "a neat, ornamental and serviceable lip stick holder which may be cheaply manufactured and readily assembled." James Bruce Mason, Jr., patented the 1st swivel-up tube in 1923. Elizabeth Arden began introducing colors other than red in the 1930s. By then teenage girls were viewing the product as a symbol of womanhood, to the consternation of their parents. Hazel Bishop formed a company in 1950 to produce her long-lasting "kissproof" No-Smear lipstick (under the slogan "stays on you ... not on him"). By the 1960s lipstick was so closely associated with femininity that women who did not wear it were suspected to be lesbians. Eventually, "Los Angeles Times" reporter Deborah Bergman coined the term "lipstick lesbians" to describe those who were attracted to other women but still wanted to remain feminine.
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