Lipsticks are like star signs. The color or brand you choose is just the tip of the iceberg

My first influencer event was in the summer of 2017 at the Museum of Ice Cream in L.A. I was there for an Instagram magazine for which I’d been writing beauty roundups. I’d decide on a theme, select relevant products, procure samples from brands and spend hours playing with them before writing rather energetic reviews of each. Our group of contributors, all women ages 18 to 28, stood in line outside the venue, sweating and talking about sweating.
Before we got to see the ice cream (a front for endless rooms staged for the main feed), we were escorted to a patch of turf with a table of goodie bags with our magazine insignia. The other women seemed to find themselves in settings like this frequently, their seamless socializing a sign that they were comfortable with — deserving of — being doted on by brands and other institutions complicit in the Girlboss Industrial Complex. I found a corner of turf from which I could observe and practice standing up straight. In the opposite corner, the most indifferent woman of the bunch burrowed her hand into her tiny purse before pulling out a translucent pink tube.
White afternoon light glinted off the stout silver handle. It was something I’d encountered only online: Dior Lip Glow. The world blurred behind her as she applied the signature pink, brightening everything about her. She threw it back in her bag like she was used to nice things. In a moment, I understood: For her, luxury was a feeling, with a scent and a texture, not the result of a Google Image search.
Everything came back into focus when it was announced that we’d go inside. “Where are you from?” one of the employees asked as we entered. “The internet,” I mumbled. People chuckled. Dior Lip Glow was one of them.
I’ll admit to my perverse love for lip stuff. If I were to be half-honest with you, I’d say that the experience of trying on my grandmother’s Clinique lipstick in Raspberry Glace when I was 4 was memorable for the realization that color was something you could wear and that I had a lifetime of finger-painting my face to look forward to. If I were to be completely and utterly honest, I was instantly enchanted with the idea of a luxury you could physically experience and nearly consume.
The eroticism of lipstick is that of a classic glamour item one uses up to the point of devouring it, yet always maintaining that critical distance — it stays on mouth, never beyond, and must remain contained (bleeding around the mouth or on teeth is déclassé). As a teenager, I wasn’t attracted in the same way to designer clothing, which was much less obtainable from where I sat in the suburbs. I wanted to be closer to what I adored. I wanted to absorb it.
It worked out that lipsticks, glosses and balms were usually affordable. Back in the day, the Clinique Chubby Stick went for $15, similar to the MAC Lipglasses I’d held in esteem. That’s not always the case anymore, although in terms of luxury items in general, they are still a much more affordable foray into the consumerist upper echelon. Can’t buy the designer bag? Try the designer bag of lipsticks.
One of the top five greatest days of my life was at my first magazine internship when the editors announced that everything in the beauty closet must go. A friend and I walked around SoHo on weekends taking photos of each other applying what we’d scrounged from the closet: YSL Candy Glaze Lip Gloss Stick, Clarins Lip Oil, Marc Jacobs Lip Lock Moisture Balm, Tom Ford Lip Color. When I was at restaurants frequented by people you’ve seen on your phone, I devised subtle ways to prove I was worthy of my seat at whatever semi-coveted table we’d secured. When we pulled out our designer gloss to publicly reapply, the thought that I’d suddenly be asked to leave was assuaged.
It was the dawn of the influencer, and luxury items — luxury signifiers — became increasingly available to those who might not otherwise afford luxury but were able to use their online popularity or social connections to leverage designer gifting. This inverted perception: Where status once begot the signifier, the signifier now begot the status. A status that, in the case of my friend and I, might not have extended past the moment we shared her compact to reapply.
I reveled in that moment, in the way a designer lip intrigues more than an outright designer look. Head-to-toe Chanel leaves nothing to the imagination; a Chanel lipstick winks as it’s unsheathed, as if to say, “This $50 stick is just the tip of the iceberg.”
I now live on the side of L.A. where the styling of luxury items is either ironic or referential. Yet even on the sweatiest and most unsophisticated of nights, I watch women on the club’s smoking patio apply the gloss that I know is $60 from my recent “Sort by: Price High to Low” Sephora search. There’s no room for irony in such a subtle flash of status-signaling. It is that exact moment that they pay for: the reveal of the familiar logo that is not reflected in the gloss’ sheen when applied. Glossy is glossy, but for a few seconds, we believe that some gloss is glossier than others.
My reapplications now mostly occur inside my car. My life in L.A. is more obscured than it was in New York. Here, it’s a privilege to live in a walkable part of town. The less one expects to be observed, the less one is expected to look put-together at most times. In this city, luxury isn’t so much expressed in how sophisticated you look but in how much you don’t care about looking sophisticated. Precision doesn’t count for much here; blurred lines and shine fare better in the sun.
These days, it’s mostly Sunnies Face Glidegloss or a MAC Powder Kiss, always accompanied by my Laneige Lip Glowy Balm of the moment. I depend on a lip that is purposely imprecise, my greatest fear that it would seem I had tried. Gloss is always liable to define its own borders or, at the very least, challenge yours. With their hazy, smeared-on texture, Powder Kiss and similarly blurry formulas do the work for you of running into a wall or making out with someone you only kind of like.
Over martinis at Figaro, my friends pull out their lipsticks and glosses one by one. The seven of us fall on a spectrum that ranges from Aquaphor to nude Armani lipstick. The Los Angeles ethos encourages warm tones, pinks and oranges — propaganda for sunsets and endless summers. My natural proclivity toward mauves challenges this, but the brown-based pink of Glidegloss in Tart gets me through. In this town, we can’t take a true red lip seriously. Whoever you’re trying to impress doesn’t live here. I memorize everyone’s picks like they’re star signs. This is, after all, just a new way of communicating something about ourselves via one of our most for-granted decisions: the lip stuff we commit to.
For all intents and purposes, I have become Dior Lip Glow Girl: I’ve settled in L.A. with enough Glows from my magazine days to last me for the foreseeable future. I’ve also become the person I imagined when I was 4, Raspberry Glace in hand: someone whose relationship with lip wear is a product of lifestyle, a mature proclivity rather than an amateur desire. And yet, it still feels like play to pull out my Dior Lip Glow as my friend reapplies her Hourglass Glossy Lip Balm, pretending to care more about the color than the happy fact that we’re conversing about it.
Art direction Jessica de JesusMakeup Selena RuizModel Stephanie Aquino
Alyson Zetta Williams is an L.A.-based writer whose work has appeared in i-D, NYLON, Rookie Mag and more. Read her stuff at sorry4444.substack.com and @alysonzw.