Every Day Lipstick

How a seemingly superficial pleasure became a small act of resistance

I wasn’t ever a big fan of donning lipstick. I’d wear it sometimes for special occasions when I was expected to dress up a bit, but I always felt it looked somewhat garish on me. It also made me feel self-conscious walking around, drawing attention from a certain type of bloke on the street whose lewd comments I would never learn to appreciate. Instead, I preferred the daily application of a particular Earl Grey tea-flavoured lip balm.

But then in 2020, two things happened. One was huge and the other was trivial, but they were connected.

The Huge One

(as if you couldn’t guess what that might be…)

As you all know, in March 2020 we entered Our Times of Covid and pretty soon into this astounding era, mostly every one around me became infected with mask-mania. Despite the ever-conflicting instructions from our saviours at the CDC —

Don’t wear a mask, it won’t stop the virus!
Wear one, but only this type!
Wear any type!
Wear two now to be on the safe side!
Wear three to be extra safe!

— practically everyone in San Francisco bought into the myth that a piece of loose-fitted cloth with gaping holes would somehow save themselves and others from the threat of a deadly virus. They ditched their own common sense and proudly wore the dirty, ineffectual rag at every occasion.

Pastel-toned hearts and a slogan that rhymes might guilt-trip the gullible.

Like all of you, no doubt, I witnessed maskers walking outside on a mostly empty street or jogging in the park inhaling C02 when their bodies were in sore need of 02. And who hasn’t spotted every mask-observer’s favourite living meme, The Lone Rider: a masked avenger in a car, windows rolled up, tout seul? Oh, but the best one ever was this one time at Lake Merritt when a friend and I, mouths agape, watched a masked man vigorously rowing in a row boat all on his lonesome, in the middle of that large lake.

Maskers never seemed to question why, if the virus was so dangerous, so deadly, our governments had not supplied hazardous waste containers on every block for safe disposal. Or why diners were required to wear the mask inside a restaurant for the 30 seconds it took to get to their table but could take it off as soon as they sat down. Or why, on an airplane, you would be obliged to sit masked for the whole flight (and yet it was OK to take it off for the meal event though you were less than one inch from a stranger) but in the lines through security, you had to mask up and you had to socially distance …

(Oh my gosh, I cannot with all the nonsense! But you get the gist!)

You are a good person if you wear a mask in SF, especially if it has a woke slogan

The poor dutiful masses diligently covered up their one and only precious breathing apparatus, in the misguided belief that it would reduce the risk of infection and transmission but ironically they become accustomed to inhaling their own exhaust, emissions which are essentially bacteria-laden.

Ew, gross!

(Seriously folks, just the sight of masks on mouths would so disgust me that I would have imaginary conversations with masked people: “C’mon, people, get real… that thing does the opposite of doing you good… do you know it actually harms you? Don’t you realize you’re allowing toxins to enter back into your body! Don’t you know that your body is intelligent and that everything it removes from itself is meant to stay out of your body, not be forced to re-enter! I mean, would you push your poo back up your own bum?!”

(Apologies for the shitty image 💩).

Worse, many of them did it to their own children right at the stage of life when their kids’ developing brains not only need regular oxygenation, but also depend on seeing human faces in order to learn and understand emotional expression, not to mention acquire language skills. (It is now well known that we have a whole cohort of kids with speech and communication issues). My heart ached for those little oxygen-deprived, bacteria-inhaling, linguistically-challenged kiddos whose sad, confused eyes I could see peering out from above the soiled cloths. Even worse, I saw how quickly those innocent kids were being trained to think of every one, but especially the unmasked, as bioweapons, people to be avoided, people to be afraid of.

Here’s a post on why kids, especially, should not wear face masks.

The Trivial One:

Only a few months into being deeply entrenched within Our Times of Covid, I was walking down Mission Street to see a man selling random toiletry items and makeup including posh brands of lipstick for only $1! Always keen for a bargain (and oblivious, at the time, to Chesa Boudin’s allowances for looters who stole less than $950 worth of goods), I found myself drawn to a certain shade and made my purchase. Back at home, I really liked how non-shiny — matte — it was. For once, the lipstick did not look tacky or “too much”; it was in fact the first lipstick colour that actually suited my particular shade of dark beige skin.

Oh, to the small, simple and seemingly superficial pleasures of life, of which there were increasingly fewer during that time…

Born Lippy

Seeing all the masked faces, day in and day out, and liking how a touch-more-than-natural the colour looked, I decided then and there to make it a point to wear it every day.

From that moment onwards, every time I had to go out for the smallest of errands, the most banal of outings, I would apply a little of the posh matte lipstick, never too thick as you don’t want it to be too obvious… a tad more than a smudge.

For many by then, the donning of a mask before leaving one’s home had become a ritual but for me, the lip colour became part of mine.

I would put it on to go to my favourite café, the one where I was still allowed to enter to buy a coffee and a bagel, but sadly was no longer permitted to consume either at a table.

I would put it on just to go sit on a bench on my street where I would read about the latest insanity on my phone. (If you happened to notice me, my pinky-red lips would intermittently be mouthing Ell oh ell.)

I would put some on just before an early evening stroll around the park. I would smear a bit on to go for an active walk up a nearby hill, whether I did that with a friend or solo. I would wear it for the many Zoom meetings that had suddenly become all the rage (and during which some people actually wore masks).

I wanted to remind people that whole entire faces still existed. I wanted those lacking in courage to see what being unafraid looked like. I wanted people — especially children — to not forget what a smile was.

A still from a short video I’ll be publishing soon…

No matter how much they tried to sell it to me, I did not care at all for The Normal That Is New.

Thus, a simple and seemingly superficial pleasure of life — adding a smudge of colour to my lips — became my every day act of resistance.

And there were many more after that.