My Grandmother’s Bindi

Makeup, an object of vanity or voice?

The year was around the 1960s. My grandmother, a twenty-something-year-old income tax officer in the intelligence and criminal investigation department, carried out unremitting raids in her cut-sleeved collared blouses and short skirts. She adorned crisp, starched handloom sarees with peach lipsticks and a short bob that her mother detested.  In contrast to her ‘make-up abstaining mother,’ she wore a small pointed liner and swore she’d wear lipstick even when she’s old (she is a woman of her word, and I witnessed her following through her whim).

My grandmother’s casual description of her appeasement to the latest fashion and the contrasting disparagement of make-up reflected by her mother often reminds me of Arati from Ray’s ‘Mahanagar’, 1963. In a particular scene, Ararti, hailing from the confines of a conservative family, meets her anglo-indian colleague- Edith, who offers a very hesitant Arati, a red lipstick. To this her immediate reaction is a strong no, questioning what she would do with the lipstick. Eventually caving in, Arati feels a sense of liberation, adorning herself in lipstick. I often wonder why women like my great-grandmother and Arati (at least initially) scorn and reject the idea of makeup. What is the common thread tying their choices together? Is it intrinsic choice that causes this aversion or is it the internalisation of society's moral policing tied to women’s everyday choices?

For years now, a woman’s choice of makeup has served as a litmus test for her character. This demoralisation of makeup in society is reflected in literature and media as early as 1 CE.  Roman poets such as Ovid, Horace and Juvenal, among others, have often criticised and diminished women as deceitful, promiscuous creatures for their use of cosmetics. Ovid writes,

  “Who would not take offence to see a face

All daub’d and dripping with the melted grease?”  

which is juxtaposed to his ‘Medicamina Faciei Femineae’ in which, through the medium of poetry, Ovid provides recipes for women’s facial enhancement. 

Horace, in one of his lesser explicit pieces, writes, “[l]et her be fair, and straight, and so far decent as not to appear desirous of seeming fairer than nature has made her.”

Juvenal expresses, “[b]ut all these medicaments And various treatments — not least the damp bread-poultice —Make you wonder what’s underneath, a face or an ulcer.” Thus, comparing poultice, a natural remedy for wounds,  to cosmetics and thus the face of the woman who applies it to an ‘ulcer’. 

This supposition of makeup as a defiance of virtue is not one that faded with time; rather, it is one that reappeared in prominent literary works we reference to this day. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, he writes, 

“Look on beauty, And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight; 

  Which therein works a miracle in nature  

Making them lightest that wear most of it” (Act 3, scene 2, 90-95)

Here, he plays with the word ‘lightness’ to indicate the ‘lightness’ of character through the “lightness” of the face. He paints the image of women indulging in makeup, in lascivious undertones.

Thus, all these pieces share in common the implication of makeup as moral corruption and frivolity of character. It places the authors in an ironic position of entitlement, desiring the outward beauty of women but in ways that are convenient and acceptable to their standards. This sentiment has not erased itself from present-day society. It is at this point one must question- is makeup just a medium perpetuating beauty standards relevant to society? Is makeup a mere capitalistic ploy prying on women’s insecurities, or can it be a medium of political control? 

The state having jurisdiction over women’s desires and indulgence is not a tale untold. In the 1700s, the British Parliament banned lipsticks, trying women for witchcraft on the account of “seduction”. The legislation read:

“All women of whatever age, rank, profession or degree, whether virgins, maids or widows, that shall, from and after such Act, impose upon, seduce and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects, by the scents, paints, cosmetic washes, artificial teeth, false hair, Spanish wool, iron stays, hoops, high-heeled shoes or bolstered hips, shall incur the penalty of the law in force against witchcraft and the like misdemeanours and [their] marriage[s], upon conviction, shall become null and void.”

Women were thus expected to confess their sin of wearing lipstick, in church. 

Ancient Greek and Victorian English societies restricted the use of red lipstick to prostitutes as a means to segregate them from the ‘virtuous’, ‘polite’ society, hence, rendering makeup to a label of identification and shame to both parties. 

Although lipstick has a history of its own in the conversation of makeup, politics and power, what especially stands out is the position of red lipstick. Red lipstick became a symbol of resilience and opposition in the suffrage protests of 1920, when women like Elizabeth Arden, took to the streets, distributing at least 15000 tubes of red lipstick as an act of rebellion. It gave women the control of narrative- from the ‘inappropriateness’ of makeup to a symbol of empowerment and protest.  However,  these protests did not yield the same result for women of colour, who had to fight for the right to vote till much later than white women celebrating this right. Thus, African- American women bore the brunt of both, sexism as well as racism.

Similarly, during World War 2, red lipstick became a symbol of patriotism and a voice against facism given Hitler’s hatred towards the product. Thus the product became a mandated aspect of women’s military attire, leading to the emergence of new shades of the lipstick such as- “Regimental Red, patriot red, fighting red’ “Montezuma Red” etc. Makeup became a form of escapism from the state of war, into normalcy. Tangee, one of America’s biggest lipstick companies launched a campaign called, “War, Women and Lipstick” promoting lipstick as a medium of patriotism and personal mettle.

During the holocaust, a Nazi camp guard and the youngest war criminal to be hanged,  Irma Grese, would torture the prisoners with the whiff of her rare perfumes and which she wore especially to torment them with the reminder of luxury, comfort and home, while they struggled with violence and basic necessities, such as that of food and water. She was often referred to as the Beautiful Beast, ”The Blond Angel,” or “the Blond Angel of Hell.” by the survivors.

A shade of a lipstick soon became synonymous with shades of the skin for, red lipstick now became the benchmark of white skin, and was often coupled with skin-lightening products in the segregationist era. With the globalisation of makeup came an assumed standard of beauty, centric to white women. Thus followed a reinforcement of beauty standards excluding and isolating black women, their identities, and their bodies from the beauty industry. Black women were prohibited from accessing cosmetic counters from departmental stores and were restricted to purchasing beauty products through mail-order advertisements and other indirect methods. This was until brands owned by black individuals emerged in the 1970s such as Fashion Fair, and later(1990) IMAN cosmetics and Opal. Another remarkable woman was Madam CJ Walker. Born to parents forced into slavery, she was the first black female entrepreneur to create a range of hair and beauty products for black women with the intention of creating products that “benefit black women not change them”.

Women like Helena Rubinstein,- a philanthropist, art collector and businesswoman who launched a beauty salon in 1902 for she believed that the emancipation of women was not restricted to rights such as that to vote but also to the right to care for themselves. 

“Right to care for themselves”, one that women often forget or are restricted the accessibility to, a nearly forgotten right. When I probe into my grandma’s favourite books, her sense of fashion, her favourite lipstick shades, I probe to see this very right, her right to care for herself, and I admire it. I ask her if she wore big, round bindis like I do,  she says yes, but she says she never liked them,  I ask why she wore them then and without a second thought she responds, she wore them because “nana ko acchi lagti thi”(your grandfather liked it). Although an act stemming from love, I think of the number of “cut-sleeved-blouse” wearing women who later gave into wearing big bindis. I question whether their decision was an act of love or a reflex of indoctrination.

I think of women like Arati from ‘Mahanagar’ and my great-grandmother, their vehemence against makeup makes me question whether its emergence is through their personal choice or is it a specimen to the patriarchal moral codes set by society. Is this rejection, a reflection of their identity, and choice or a mere echo of the shame, guilt and justification demanded by society? The objectification theory explains how women internalise an observer’s perspective, shifting the primary focus of themselves to the gaze of an external observer, perpetuating the habit of body monitoring and thus, “increasing opportunities for shame and guilt”. Thus, women become secondary objects in their own identity and passive to their own choices. 

The history of makeup has always posed a duality, with women in North Korea, having their liberty to use something as common as makeup taken away, to South Korean women having makeup forced onto their everyday lives, both retaliating with the presence and absence of makeup subsequently. They both fight for the same cause, choice- the very choice that is snatched away from them. 

The attempt through this piece is not to invoke in the reader an urgency to side with the bleak or bright of makeup, nor is it to influence the decision of condoning or condemning makeup for you, the reader. It is to simply realise that women’s indulgences, thus, the symbolism of femininity, is not fickle; it is not mere vanity but rather poses a historical and political nuance. Makeup has and continues to act as an agent for expression and voice, to diminish that voice, to degrade it or to deem it as ‘superficial’ is to censor it. Makeup is but a medium, but an object, whose power lies in the intentionality of its user. Makeup has proved to be the vessel for power, change, political statement and, most importantly, agency. However, it has also, in many cases become a vessel to reinforce expected beauty standards and social restraint. I hope when you pick up a lipstick, you remember the history and symbolism of its power, and the advocacy of women who used it as resistance. Should you choose not to apply it too, I hope central to that choice lies agency, control and narrative, powerful enough to reject the adherence to a certain aesthetic-appeasement expected by women to shoulder.

Picture Credits: http://collectingvintagecompacts.blogspot.com/2014/06/tangee-druggist-his-daughter-and-power.html