Are you Sure You Want to Do This?

Maneka Gandhi

Ever wonder what goes into a simple tube of lipstick? Maneka Gandhi tells us, though she also warns us that we may find out more than we wanted to know. Gandhi writes a regular column in the Illustrated Weekly of India, although this essay was published in the Baltimore Sun (1989).

Are you one of those women who feel that lipstick is one of the essentials of life? That to be seen without it is the equivalent of facial nudity? Then you might like to know what goes into that attractive color tube that you smear on your lips.

At the center of the modern lipstick is acid. Nothing else will burn a coloring sufficiently deeply into the lips. The acid starts out orange, then sizzles into the living skin cells and metamorphoses into a deep red. Everything else in the lipstick is there just to get this acid into place.

First lipstick has to spread. Softened food shortening, such as hydrogenated vegetable oil, spreads very well, and accordingly is one of the substances found in almost all lipsticks. Soap smears well too, and so some of that is added as well. Unfortunately, neither soap nor shortening is good at actually taking up the acid that's needed to do the dyeing. Only one smearable substance will do this to any extent: castor oil.

Good cheap castor oil, used in varnishes and laxatives, is one of the largest ingredients by bulk in every lipstick. The acid soaks into the castor oil, the castor oil spreads on the lips with the soap and shortening till the acid is carried where it needs to go.

If lipstick could be sold in castor oil bottles there would be no need for the next major ingredient. But the mix has to be transformed into a rigid, streamlined stick, and for that nothing is better than heavy petroleum-based wax. It's what provides the "stick" in lipstick.

Of course, certain precautions have to be taken in combining all these substances. If the user ever got a sniff of what was in there, there might be problems of consumer acceptance. So a perfume is poured in at the manufacturing stage before all the oils have cooled--when it is still a molten lipstick mass.

At the same time, food preservatives are poured into the mass, because apart from smelling rather strongly the oil in there would go rancid without some protection. (Have you smelled an old lipstick? That dreadful smell is castor oil gone bad.)

All that's lacking now is shine. When the preservatives and the perfume are being poured in, something shiny, colorful, almost iridescent--and, happily enough, not even too expensive--is added. That something is fish scales. It's easily available from the leftovers of commercial fish-packing stations. The scales are soaked in ammonia, then bunged in with everything else.

Fish scales, by the way, mean that lipstick is not a vegetarian product. Every time you paint your lips you eat fish scales. So lipsticks without them actually are marked"vegetarian lipstick."

Is that it then? Shortening, soap, castor oil, petroleum wax, perfume, food preservatives and fish scales? Not entirely. There is still one thing missing: color.

The orange acid that burns into the lips only turns red on contact. So that what you see in the tube looks like lip color and not congealed orange juice, another dye has to be added to the lipstick. This masterpiece of chemistry and art will be a soothing and suggestive and kissable red.

But it has very little to do with what actually goes on your face. That, as we said, is--but by now you already know more than you wanted to.

Activities:

1.  Consider the title of the essay and what Gandhi has to say about what goes into a tube of lipstick. What is her main point (implied main idea)?

2.  How does Gandhi convey her message without directly stating what she means? To answer this question, make a list of the ingredients used in making lipstick. For each ingredient, discuss and state the inference each ingredient brings to mind.