On the Traditional Beauty of Japanese Women (1): Green Lips, Black Teeth

Nothing fascinates more than the ghostly beauty of the geisha

 with her iridescent green lips and blackened teeth ...

 

 

There are three traditional elements which compose the beauty of the Japanese woman: white skin; black teeth; green lips. Here, I'd like to discuss the last two of these elements and then, in part two of this post, examine the significance and appeal of the first.

 

Green Lips

 

The art of painting lips is an ancient one in Japan and the traditional lip colouring was called Komachi-beni - a name derived from the red pigment extracted in minute amounts from the thistle-like safflower, known as benibana in Japanese. 

 

The use of beni grew in popularity during the 17th-century and by the end of the 19th-century it was found on every fashionable woman's dressing table, contained in a small porcelain bowl called an ochoko, where, interestingly, it would dry into a shimmering green powder (this providing proof of its authenticity).

 

Whilst beni would turn back to red when moistened with a finger tip or lip brush, something of this natural greenness continued to shine through when layered on the lips. Sometimes, women wishing to intensify this iridescent effect would first paint their lips with beni, then use a green pigment obtained from the stem of a bamboo plant.  

 

Sadly, but hardly surprisingly, during the 20th-century - particularly after 1945 - Western cosmetics (and Western ideals of beauty) rose to dominance and handy oil-based lipsticks (in more conventional shades) became the norm.  

 

 

Black Teeth

 

Prior to the Meiji era, Japanese women may have loved their red-green lips and milk-white skin, but, like women in other Southeast Asian and Oceanic cultures, so too did they have a penchant for blackening their teeth.

 

Whilst this practice, known as ohaguro, certainly had an erotic as well as an aesthetic aspect - pubescent girls would paint their teeth black in order to signal their sexual maturity - it was primarily (and somewhat ironically) done to prevent tooth decay.

Sadly, in 1870, the government banned ohaguro and the practice had died out almost entirely by the 1920s. In the contemporary era, you might sometimes see a performer at a cultural festival with blackened teeth, or an actor on stage, or perhaps - if lucky - you may encounter a geisha girl who still likes to indulge in the habit. 

 

However, whilst a small number of Westerners may show a fetishistic fascination for the blackened teeth of geisha girls, most will react with horror - particularly if combined with green lips. For whilst we may not insist on the redness of the latter, we value teeth for their pearly whiteness; a sign, for us, not only of oral hygiene, but wealth.  

 

 

On the Politics of Lipstick

Victory Red lipstick by Elizabeth Arden

 No lipstick will win the war. But it symbolises why we're fighting. 

I.

Can we ever maintain a pure distinction between aesthetics and politics? I don't think so. In fact, it seems to me that questions to do with art, fashion, and the extraordinary profusion of forms and ideas belonging to modern culture are always at the same time questions to do with power and ways of living in the world; what I would term philosophical questions.       

And so, the question of cosmetics, for example, is just as important as a question concerning the economy. Examining our own thinking and discourse around the simple act of wearing lipstick allows us not merely to stage a strategic engagement with historical fascism, but to confront also the molecular fascism that exists in us all.   

In a preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault asks: How does one keep from being fascist? How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism? It isn't easy. But there are a number of things one can do (or not do) and a number of things one needs to watch out for.

For example, it's wise to exercise caution before exclusively tying an ideal of Beauty to Nature and to Truth (and thus also to the Good). It doesn't necessarily make you a Nazi if you do so and believe chapped lips have some kind of transcendental superiority - it might mean, rather, that you're a Platonist, a puritan, or simply a sad militant always on the lookout for signs of decadence - but it's not coincidental that the Nazis did precisely this ... 


II.

As soon as they gained power in 1933, the Nazis not only started to prepare for war and to persecute the Jews, they also attempted to control every aspect of women's lives, including how they looked.

Although Hitler wanted German women to be the best-dressed in Europe, trousers were out (too unfeminine) and so was the use of fur in fashion (too cruel). He also disapproved of hair dye, thought perfume disgusting, and hated makeup - particularly lipstick, which he never tired of telling everyone was made from waste animal fat.

For the Führer, the fashions coming out of Paris, pioneered by designers like Chanel, encouraged an unnaturally slender (boyish-looking) silhouette; that was no good, as he wanted German women to be physically robust breeding sows; all hips and tits and no cigarettes, paint, or powder. Aryan beauty would be wholesome, clean, and fresh-faced; the antithesis of that artificial and androgynous look favoured by the Neue Frauen parading around Berlin during the Weimar period.    

Thus it was that the Allies - whether they liked it or not - were obliged to affirm the use of cosmetics. If loose lips sunk ships, then painted red lips would provide the kiss of death to the Third Reich. 

British women, therefore, applied makeup  - even though it became an increasingly scarce commodity traded on the black market - as a patriotic duty. It was what we might term an essential non-essential and even government officials realised that lipstick mattered as much to women as tobacco mattered to men.  

American girls - including those serving in the armed forces or working on factory lines - also continued to wear their lipstick with pride in order to retain their femininity, boost morale, and stick it to Hitler. Shades including Victory Red and Fighting Red were created by cosmetic companies such as Elizabeth Arden keen to do their bit for the war effort.

Feminists still celebrate J. Howard Miller's iconic figure of Rosie the Riveter, but it's often overlooked that she always had perfect makeup and never surrendered her right to be glamorous as well as strong and free.         

See: 

Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. xi-xiv. 

Marlen Komar, 'Makeup and War Are More Intricately Connected Than You Realized', Bustle (28 Oct 2017): click here to read online.

Sandra Lawrence, 'Beetroot and boot-polish: How Britain's women faced World War 2 without make-up', The Telegraph (3 March 2015): click here to read online.

Elizabeth Nicholas, 'The Little-Known Lipstick Battle of World War II',  Culture Trip (14 June 2018): click here to read online.

Jane Thynne, 'Fashon and the Third Reich', History Today (12 March 2013): click here to read online. 

Note: this post was written in response to a series of comments on an earlier post on lips and lipstick: click here. 

Lipstick Traces: Lessons for Lucia

Lucia Pica photographed by Daniel Jackson 

Vogue (Sept 2015)

Like many people, when I heard a couple of years ago that Italian-born, London-based Lucia Pica had been appointed creative director at Chanel cosmetics, I was very happy for her and very hopeful of what we might expect; for she is undoubtedly a makeup artist with a bold and brilliant understanding of colour and unafraid of taking risks.

Expectations were further raised when it was revealed that her first collection for the label would in part be inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard; that we could finally delight in nail polish and lipstick that pops with hyperreal playfulness.  

Unfortunately, however, if you take time to read interviews with Ms Pica, you discover that she subscribes to a disappointing model of aesthetic idealism, in which beauty is something essential and makeup merely a method of enhancement that should never be allowed to mask the natural character of a face, so that the real woman can shine through.

In other words, the ultimate personal expression is that of your own true self.   

Having resisted the urge to vomit, I'd like - at the risk of repeating what I've said elsewhere on this blog - to provide some lessons for Lucia on artifice and nature (and the nature of artifice), in relation to the question of Woman conceived in terms of style and seduction ...  

1. Woman is a myth activated through a system of signs encoded, for example, in art and fashion.

2. Those things which serve to construct her femininity, such as her shoes, her makeup and her lingerie, matter more than her biology. For whilst the latter determines her as a female belonging to a species of domestic animal, it does not determine her as a woman. In other words, her being is not naturally given; she is not born a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir put it, but becomes such via culture.

3. Because of this, woman fully understands the need for illusion and defends the right to lie. She uses cosmetics not because she wishes to conceal an essence or a hidden reality beneath appearance, but because she has no inner self and only wants to make us think she does. To mistake the exceeding of nature for a crude camouflaging of the truth, is to commit a cardinal error. Makeup isn't false - it's the falser than false and so recuperates a kind of superior innocence.       

4. Further, via a confident and sophisticated use of clothes and cosmetics, a woman can strike a blow against the puritanical drabness of the world with its neutral tones and sensible footwear, rediscovering the power of witchcraft known as glamour. As Baudelaire writes:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. [...] It matters but little that [her] artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

5. If this means that woman risks surrendering to emptiness and reification on the one hand, whilst becoming commodified and fetishized on the other, this need not necessarily be such a bad thing; models, actresses and prostitutes, for example, have all cleverly turned their object status and vacancy into an art, exploiting what Walter Benjamin termed the sex appeal of the inorganic (i.e. that pale power of seduction and stillness founded upon the ecstasy of a blank gaze and a Pan Am smile).   

6. Finally, Lucia, you might like to consider how it is only at the symbolic level of appearances that systems become fragile and only via enchantment that the power and meaning of these systems becomes vulnerable. In other words, the idiosyncratic feminism of Coco Chanel - in which you profess an interest - needs to be understood as a politics of style that is all about a light manipulation of appearances, rather than a politics of desire and identity that still concerns itself with libidinal and psychological depths.

Why become fixated on true feelings and ontological foundations, when you can just add more lipstick and attack?

See:

Stephen Alexander, Philosophy on the Catwalk (Blind Cupid Press, 2011).

Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life' in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press, 2006).

Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow, (University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Lex Oppia: On Women, Cosmetics and Austerity in Ancient Rome

Julie Ege as Voluptua in Up Pompeii, 
dir. Bob Kellett, 1971

The noblewomen of Ancient Rome - being sophisticated and molto moderne - understood that everything that served to display their beauty and enhance their status, including make-up, was of crucial importance. Via a bold and striking use of white foundation, black eye-liner and red lipstick, for example, they struck a blow for their own sex in a patriarchal society and exploited the glamorous power of cosmetics.    

Originally used only for ritual purposes, expensive cosmetics and perfumes imported from far away lands, quickly became central to the life of the privileged few women - and the prostitutes - who could afford to purchase these items and had skilled slaves (known as cosmatae) to help apply them throughout the course of the day.

In 215 BC, however, at the height of the Second Punic War, a law was passed - the Lex Oppia - which aimed not only to limit women's wealth, but any conspicuous display of wealth; specifically, it forbade any woman to possess more than half an ounce of gold, to wear multi-coloured clothing (particularly garments trimmed in purple), to ride in an animal-drawn vehicle through the city streets, or use designer cosmetics. 
  

The Lex Oppia was thus more than merely an economic measure drawn up in response to serious financial crisis; it sought to establish an era of austerity by restricting the freedom and splendour of women. The basis for this sexist moral concern with luxury was the assumption that these things were signs of decadence; they encouraged greed and self-indulgence and, it was said, undermined male virtue.  

Following victory over Carthage, however, fortunes soon revived in Rome as riches from the newly conquered regions began to flow into the hands of the ruling elite, giving them - and their women - the opportunity to lead more excessive lifestyles. Thus, there was a radical change in mood and in mores; with financial woes left behind, there was no reason not to live large or to have dowdy wives and mistresses. 

Any continuing efforts to legally prohibit displays of wealth or deny feminine beauty proved unpopular and largely unsuccessful and it was eventually proposed that the Lex Oppia be repealed, despite vehement protest from Cato the Elder, who argued that the law had removed the shame of poverty and vice of envy because it ensured that all women dressed in a very similar, very simple manner and didn't disguise themselves like whores with too much make-up. 

Cato - a senator well known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization - further insisted that women's insatiable desire to spend money beyond their means on shoes, clothes, cosmetics, perfume, jewellery, and elaborate hairstyles, was an incurable disease that threatened the well-being and good order of Roman society. Once they had been corrupted by luxury, he said, women became like wild animals; no longer to be trusted to restrain thelmselves from rushing headlong into an orgy of lavish and immoral behaviour.

Whilst the men continued to endlessly debate the issue, the women of Rome took to the streets, demanding the right to wear the clothes and make-up of their own choosing and ignoring their husbands and the magistrates who ordered them to return home and remain silent. Amusingly - and impressively - this persistent proto-feminist revolt into style proved successful and the Lex Oppia was formally repealed in 195 BC, much to the delight of the women who paraded victorious in their now legal finery around the Forum. 

Thoughts on the Phrase 'Black is Beautiful'

Photo: Rachel Marquez
Model: Janica @ Best Models
rachelmarquez.com

Whiteness, of course, isn't a colour, it's a normative cultural value; an ideal we are all obliged to accept and aspire to whatever our race or ethnicity. The paler the face the better the person; not only more attractive, but more noble, more spiritual. Darkness of skin betrays darkness of soul; something base and bestial.

Such thinking, of course, which has a long and ugly history, deserves to be challenged; I absolutely support those who subscribe to a political aesthetic that promotes black pride and defiantly declares in the face of white racism that black is beautiful.

However, things become problematic when those who subscribe to such and refuse to cosmetically alter their appearance start to assert their own moral superiority, sneering at those who don't sport afros and accusing them of racial treachery.

To turn a slogan conceived as a form of self-affirmation into a weapon with which to censure others is not only a form of militant asceticism and bullying, but often also betrays sexist hypocrisy on behalf of black males who, on the one hand, voice disapproval of the millions of women who do use skin lightening products and straighten their hair, whilst, on the other hand, dating light-skinned models or marrying white women.

Sometimes, when a woman of colour bleaches her skin, she's not denying her blackness due to self-hatred and internalised racism - she's not betraying her roots - rather, she's simply making a considered choice about how she wants to look and acting with a degree of realism in the world as it is rather than as it could be, should be, and hopefully one day will be.

In a miscegenated future I would like to think no one will feel pressured to wear whiteface and pass as something or someone they're not; but neither will it be any more reprehensible or controversial for a black woman to lighten up cosmetically or surgically modify her body than it is presently for a white woman to work on her tan and have lip injections.

In a world after Michael I hope that all skin tones and facial features are seen as beautiful - be they natural or artificial (human or inhuman) - and a free spectrum of colours replaces the rigid black and white binary designed (like all such binaries) to keep us in a fixed identity.

Put on a Little Makeup ...

One of the things that I find a joy to watch is a young woman putting on her makeup in the morning whilst on the tube and, presumably, on her way to work; particularly when she does so with real concern and concentration and completely oblivious to the presence of her fellow passengers. 

For me, there's always something moving and magical about seeing a woman perform an otherwise private function in public; creating a little space and time for herself and about herself in a busy world with nothing more than foundation, blusher, mascara, and lipstick.

One invariably thinks of what Baudelaire wrote on the female use of cosmetics:

"Woman is quite within her rights, indeed she is even accompanying a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural; she has to astonish and charm us; as an idol, she is obliged to adorn herself in order to be adored. It matters but little that the artifice and trickery are known to all, so long as their success is assured and their effect always irresistible."

                                                                                                                   
- Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, (Phaidon Press Ltd., 1995), p. 33.